Month: April 2016

What is Google Tag Manager?

Posted on by Mario

What is Google Tag manager

Nowadays, a lot of tools are given to help digital marketers perform better through a more eligible data. Some of the most popular one are Google analytics and Google tag manager; both of them offer many benefits which can also be used as a tool to analyze data. There is lot of explanations about Google analytics since it has been popular among many digital marketers and SEO services, so this time we will discuss about tag manager which is also amazing to be used while it may not as widespread as Google analytics. Therefore, if this tool hasn’t been familiar in your ear, you can read the brief explanation of Google tag manager below since we’ve outlined what it is and what advantages it can bring to you.

Google Tag Manager Defined

Google Tag manager is a free tool which works as marketers assistant to control digital marketing data by using code snippets on any website. It helps giving a report of conversion tracking, website analytics, retargeting, and many more tracking purposes. Google Tag Manager permits customization based on the user requirements, using the user’s own set of tools. It results in better integrations based on current work processes.

Moreover, It provides you with full control about how your tags fire and are defined. Therefore, tags management permits marketers to be able to manage tags easily onto the website. The elimination of that step in the process also eliminates cost and helps improve the website. In fact, making changes without IT or developer involvement is simple nowadays since the existence of Google Tag Manager.

Google Tag managers at some points have some similarities with Google analytics, and the main similarity between Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics lies in the use of codes. Both give users a code to be placed within the site for website tracking when they are signing up. Moreover, both of them use the data-layer to everything that gets passed through Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager where it contains different variables on the site.

Create the Perfect Website Layout System

Posted on by Mario

Create the perfect website layout system

Creating a good system that can represent your need sometimes obtains extra effort on it, especially for web designers who are building website layout system. If you do not have a right picture on how to create a perfect website layout system, you can take a look on the points below as your inspiration.

Multi-Column

Even though, multi column is a highly flexible technique and perfectly suitable for lists of links, like navigations, footers, search results or photo blogs, you can see that not many websites use CSS columns. This is because they are horrible to use when the article is higher than the viewport which makes people scroll down and up while reading the article. Therefore, to avoid making your users scroll up and down, you can simplify the design of your site through scrolling it horizontally and setting the height of the article to a maximum of 100 per cent of the viewport with no less than 20em for columns. It may changeling to encourage your visitors to scroll horizontally. As a solution, you could add new UI elements to clear this up or you could choose to always make sure the columns never fit completely in the viewport by doing the code below:

article { columns: 20em; /* never be smaller than 20em */ height: 100vh; /* be as high as the viewport */ width: 75vw; /* be 75% of the width of the viewport */ }

Flexbox and the Viewport

According to Tab Atkins, Flexbox is for one-dimensional layouts – anything that needs to be laid out in a straight line (or in a broken line, which would be a single straight line if they were joined back together).

For some people it sounds like float, but if you look closer, you will understand that it’s more powerful. Flexbox enables you to create simple looking layouts which are impossible to be made few years ago. For instance, if there is any white space leftover, it can tell you what to do with them, such as leave it at one of the ends, you can also distribute it evenly between or around them, or you can decide to stretch the items. Moreover, you can try using media queries, if you want the browser to simply fit as many items on each row as possible.

 Quantity Selectors

This technique provides more advantages rather than float, CSS columns, and flexbox with viewport calculations. Moreover, you can make the browser performs the task in a certain manner. In fact, you can let the browser and the content figure it out together instead of designing every possible layout for every possible screen size.

It may not always work, so at some points you will need finer control over the different layouts, and for extreme screen sizes you need to define exceptions.  In the case, media queries are a fantastic tool that you surely need.

3 Things to Confirm When Auditing E-Commerce Sites for SEO

Posted on by Mario

5 things to validate while auditing e commerce sites for SEO

E-commerce businesses depend very much on Google rankings which cause SEO audits are a must. If you run a SEO service and discover that it is important to resolve any issues you find, below are three things to be audited when it comes to e-commerce site for SEO.

  1. Flush Out Thin or Duplicate Content

Create more content will be good for you, since Google will be happy to point traffic your way however, many writers use this opportunity the wrong way, for example they place similar content on separate pages which will split and weaken your traffic to individual pages. Besides, be careful on creating too much duplicate content decreases a site’s overall SEO. Duplicate content also puts you at risk of an algorithm penalty, which is some of the hardest SEO trouble spots to fix because you won’t get notified. So you better avoid having any difficult content to get better SEO rank by following the things below:

  • Product descriptions should always be your own. Never use the manufacturer’s lifeless, repetitive descriptions.
  • Use robots.txt to seal off any repetitive areas of a page, like headers and footers, so they don’t get crawled.
  • Use canonical tags to prevent accidental duplication.
  1. Use Canonical Tags

Sometimes, there might be some addresses that direct to the same page, so to avoid this thing, Google use Canonical tags to tell which parts of a website are “canonical” – a permanent part of the site. Two things happen when multiple routes to a page create multiple URLs that all point to the same page. First, Google sees them as different pages and splits traffic between them, and your page authority nosedives. Second, each page will be indexed by Google as a duplicate. The best solution is to use canonical tags, so that Google will ignore those pages, rather than indexing them and flagging your site for duplication.

However, Google will count your URL as unique due to their different URLs, furthermore traffic will be split four ways even though each page is the same. Moreover, Google will sort out the amount of visitor that each page will get, for example, a page that gets 1000 visitors shows up in Google’s algorithm as receiving 250, while the “other three pages” get the additional traffic.

  1. Paginate Categories

Pagination issues can be found even in smaller e-commerce sites. In fact, pagination is a two-edged sword. For instance, if you’re going to have site that anyone can find their way around, pagination is a must, but on the other hand pagination can confuse Google, since it is quite close with duplicate content issues, from paginated and view-all versions of the same page; backlinks and other ranking signals can be spread out among paginations, diluting their effects. Additionally, in very large categories, crawl depth can be an issue to.

You can use canonical tags to identify the view-all pages as the “real” one for indexing purposes which will save you from duplication issues, but there are some shortcomings to this approach. Multi product categories and search results won’t have view-all pages due to the large size requirement, so you can’t canonicalize in that case. Moreover, you can also use rel=”next” and rel=”prev” HTML markup to differentiate paginated pages; make sure if you do this you don’t canonicalize the first page.