Digital Marketing &

Transformation
BCA6026
 Syllabus
Module I:
– Introduction to Digital Marketing
– Website and Blogging
– Content Promotion
Module II:
– Email Marketing
– Social Media Marketing
Module III:
– Mobile Marketing
– Marketing Analytics & ROI
 MODULE-I
• Introduction to Digital Marketing
– Modern Marketing- How Marketing Works,
– Fundamentals Channels- Awareness,
– Consideration & Decision Making,
– Building Integrated Marketing Plan,
– Lead Journey- From Prospect to Sales.
• Website and Blogging
– The Power Of Storytelling, Know Your Customer - Market
And Content Research,
– Construct Prospective Buyer Personas & Journeys,
– Establishing The Content Ideation & Creation Framework,
– Creative Design Principles,
– Linking Blogs To Social Network (Conversation Blogs),
– Measuring And Optimizing Blog Performance,
– Importance Of Responsive Design,
– Leverage Landing Pages And Forms To Accelerate
Conversion.
• Content Promotion
– SEO as an Art and as a Science,
– Ranking Algorithms,
– Website Audit,
– Optimizing Digital Assets & Metadata,
– Decoding Common Paid Media Platforms,
– Influencer Marketing,
– Black Hat, White Hat and Grey Hat SEO
 PART-I
INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL MARKETING
 Digital Marketing Introduction
• Marketing: a gateway of influence between
producers and consumers
Digital Vs Traditional Marketing
 Digital marketing
• The promotion of products or brands via one or more forms
of electronic media
and
• It provides different methods to analyze the marketing
campaigns and understand on what is working and what isn’t
– typically in real time.

“Marketing of products and services

using digital technologies”
• Digital marketers are the ones who monitor
the wireless based channels and decipher
insights like what is being viewed, how often
and for how long it is being viewed, sales
conversions, what content works and doesn’t
work, etc.
 Digital marketing channels
• Internet is the channel most closely associated with
digital marketing however they would also include
wireless channels like text messaging, mobile instant
messaging, mobile apps, podcasts, digital television
and radio channels, etc.
 Goal of digital marketing
• Utilize the medium of digital devices to
connect identified targeted segments of users
with relevant business offerings.
• Marketers design various strategies to target
and reach out to prospects to grab their
attention and eventually convert them to loyal
customers.
 Why digital marketing
• 71% of companies plan to increase their digital marketing budgets
year on year (Source: Webbiquity)
• On average, 60% of a marketer’s time is devoted to digital
marketing activities, fueling demand for digital marketing skills
(Source: Smart Insights and Ecommerce Expo)
• One-third of businesses have embraced a Digital Transformation
program while the other one third have put forward proposals to
implement a similar strategy (Source: Smart Insights and TFM&A)
• Digital content creation and management now claim the second-
largest share of digital marketing budgets (Source: KaPost)
• 28% of marketers have reduced their traditional advertising budget
to fund more digital marketing (Source: CMO Council )
• 73% of B2B marketers use video as a content marketing tactic, and
7% of marketers plan on increasing their YouTube marketing
initiatives (Source: Content Marketing Institute)
 The Digital Conversion Funnel
acquisition to conversion to retention

The process begins with Leads are

prospect targeting, acquired,
followed by converted to
funneling the acquired
lead customers, and
towards conversion. then retained
for additional
transactions.
 Check your knowledge
• Doing business online brings lots of fantastic
opportunities – it can really help your
company in new and exciting ways.
• Once your business is online, what
opportunities can you take advantage of?
 Select the 5 right answers
A. Finding lots of new customers – everyone’s
online these days
B. Selling your products or services straight from
your website or app
C. Delivering targeted advertising to customers
D. Saving money on your heating bills
E. Learning more about what your customers love
F. Using analytics to power your online sales
 Answers:
A. Finding lots of new customers – everyone’s
online these days
B. Selling your products or services straight
from your website or app
C. Delivering targeted advertising to customers
E. Learning more about what your customers
love
F. Using analytics to power your online sales
 1.1.1 Modern Marketing - How It Works

• What are the things which the customer

wants?
• How these things can be made available to
them?
 6 Concepts of modern marketing

• Concept of Production
• Concept of Product
• Concept of Selling
• Concept of Marketing
• Concept of Customer
• Concept of Societal marketing
 a) Concept of Production
• Primary focus
– manufacturing or production.
• Presume that
– The customer will buy the product which comes out in the market and
– will respond accordingly to available products only.
• Note that this concept is rarely applied in the modern
marketing world as it boosts sales in the initial stages,
but in the longer run it tends to become unfriendly and
is unaware of customer interests.
 b) Concept of Product
• Primary focus
– features and the quality of the product,
• Presume that
– the product can only survive in the competitive world by
maintaining the quality standards.
• This concept suggests that customers will respond to
products of the best quality at the most reasonable
price.
 c) Concept of Selling
• Primary focus
– On sales
• Presume that
– The increase in sales volume would eventually increase
their profits.
 d) Concept of Marketing
• Primary focus
– product promotion,
• Presume that
– consumers should know about the product before
they make a buying decision.
• This also helps in creating a perception of
transparency which in-turn builds trust.
 e) Concept of Customer
• Primary focus
– one to one marketing,
– and this is always applied in conjunction with the
concept of marketing.
• Presume that
– One to one interaction with customer to attain
progressive levels of trust.
 f) Concept of Societal marketing
• Companies implementing this concept are not only
focused on product sales or profits but also believe in
giving back something to society for human welfare.
1.1.2 Fundamentals channels- Awareness,
Consideration & Decision Making
Awareness:
• Potential customers are drawn into this stage through
marketing campaigns and consumer research and discovery.
• Trust and thought leadership is established with events,
advertising, trade shows, content (blog posts, etc.), webinars,
direct mail, viral campaigns, social media, search, media
mentions, and more.
• Here, lead generation takes place, as information is collected
and leads are pulled into a lead management system for
nurturing further down the funnel.
Interest
• Once leads are generated, they move on to the interest stage,
• Learn more about the company, its products, and any helpful
information and research it provides.
• Here is an opportunity for brands to develop a relationship
with the people in its lead database and introduce its
positioning.
• Marketers can nurture leads through emails, content that is
more targeted around industries and brands, classes,
newsletters, and more.
Consideration
• In the consideration stage, leads have been changed
into marketing qualified leads and are seen as prospective
customers.
• Marketers can send prospects, more information about
products and offers through automated email campaigns,
while continuing to nurture them with targeted content, case
studies, free trials, and more.
Intent
• To get to the intent stage, prospects must demonstrate that
they are interested in buying a brand’s product.
• This can happen in a survey, after a product demo, or when a
product is placed in the shopping cart on an ecommerce
website.
• This is an opportunity for marketers to make a strong case for
why their product is the best choice for a buyer.
Evaluation
• In the evaluation stage, buyers are making a final decision
about whether or not to buy a brand’s product or services.
• Typically, marketing and sales work together closely to
nurture the decision-making process and convince the buyer
that their brand’s product is the best choice.
Purchase
• This is the last stage in the marketing funnel, where a
prospect has made the decision to buy and turns into a
customer.
• This is where sales takes care of the purchase transaction.
• A positive experience on the part of the buyer can lead to
referrals that fuel the top of the marketing funnel, and the
process begins again.
• This model or fundamental channels are purely based on the
interest of the audience.
• Being a marketer, it is necessary to know the type of audience
and their specific interest to gain efficiency in your marketing
strategies.
• Content mapping strategy plays a key role in understanding
the audience and deriving their topic of interest.
 Buyer’s Journey

Awareness Consideration Decision

 1.1.3.Building Integrated Marketing Plan

• It is about bringing all the marketing and branding techniques

together
• Its aim is to develop a tight, seamless, and professional nature
for a company.
• This technique can give even small businesses the chance to
jet-power their branding and marketing strategies.
• A great example of an integrated marketing campaign is Coke's 'share a
coke with' campaign, which used unified messaging across TV, Social,
Outdoor and Display leading to a 7% uplift in Coke consumption by the
target demographic, making it one of the most successful Coke campaigns
in history.
 Benefits of integrated marketing communications

Efficiency
• It helps to streamline the processes.
• Once decided on the tactic, it needs to be implemented
across each channel.
• It results in a simplified campaign.
• We can use the same messaging and imagery across the
campaign,
• We can reduce everything from resource usage, to meeting,
and planning time.
Effectiveness
• Connecting the campaigns with the help of an integrated
marketing agency can help to make a given strategy more
effective.
• It provides a consistent communication through a range of
channels,
• It highlight the planned message to a wider audience.
• Uniformity in the image increases trust and awareness.
Economical
• Graphics, photography and content can be expensive for any
business.
• It save money on creating campaigns,
• It also cuts down on budget wasting that might occur due to
disjointed and confusing campaigns.
• This means we get a better return on the investments.
 1.1.4.Lead Journey- From Prospect to Sales

• Demand Generation: is creating demand or curiosity for your

product.
• For example, when content is used to spread the brand
awareness, so as a customer thinks of our brand when
choosing a product and/or service.
• Lead Generation is the process of collecting relatively specific
information about potential customers,
• We can turn them into sales leads.
• These leads will receive content from us which will help build
trust and further turn into sales.

NOTE: leads aren't customers, they are potential customers.

• Demand and Lead generation is done through three media
types:
1. Paid media – Traditional advertising
2. Owned media – Website, social and email marketing,
branding.
3. Earned media (or free media) refers to publicity
gained through promotional efforts.(word of mouth,
referrals, reviews).
Lead generation funnel
• Lead magnet (also known as opt-in bribe) is an incentive
you offer to potential buyers in exchange for their contact
information such as name, email, phone number, etc.

• Landing page, sometimes known as a "lead capture page",

"static page" or a "destination page", is a single web page
that appears in response to clicking on a search engine
optimized search result or an online advertisement.
• The landing page will usually display directed sales copy
that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search
result or link.
• Opt-in email is a term used when someone is given the option
to receive email.
• Typically, this is some sort of mailing list, newsletter, or
advertising.
• Without obtaining permission before sending email, the email
is unsolicited bulk email, better known as spam.
 Summary of what we need to do to build out
your lead generation funnel.
• Map out the customer journey in the business.
• Map out the points of contact we have with our customers.
• Create one or more lead magnets to attract visitors to submit
their email address.
• Create landing pages, opt-in forms and thank you pages.
• Link to an ESP to capture email address and deliver lead
magnet and lead nurture email sequence.
 PART –II
WEBSITE & BLOGGING
1.2.1. The Power of Storytelling
“Story telling is a way to connect with anyone irrespective of
the culture or the region. State-of-the-art technology will
change, but state-of-the-heart storytelling will always be the
same”.

• Human beings are emotional creatures and stories are

impossible to be resisted by anyone provided if you hear a
good one.
• “The better the story, the more successful the
product and business”.
• The story should be a representation of ‘what’ and ‘why’ of an
organization.
– What are you doing?
– Why are you doing it?

• In the terms of Digital Marketing, “If the content is King then

the Queen is the visual elements.”
 Story-telling tips
• Having the information written textually on a website is
simply not enough, so it is essential to publish it in a way that
people can enjoy and understand it.
• Visuals are highly important for a website.
• One can use pictures to tell stories all the time.
• Images and videos hold more power over the audience than
words.
• Well-told visual stories can really move, mold, or melt the
reader’s, heart.
• Convincing visual stories will develop strong engagement by
evoking emotions, instilling connections with the viewer.
Creating Emotional Connections
• Communicate with Visuals: Storytelling on a website isn’t really a
marketing tactic, instead, it is their history which they share with
the world.
• Display and video are the two-primary purpose for the fastest
growing digital marketing.
• So, the way a brand is seen, will be the most critical to the decision
process and buying cycle.
• Bringing a Story to Life: “Animate the Content” - The stories and
the art of storytelling plays a major role in bringing lively stories to
the end user.
• Creating an appealing content would help in achieving the business
goals.
• The audience would prefer to purchase a product/service being
offered if the story is associated with the content of website.
 1.2.2. Know Your Customer - Market & Content Research

• Below are a few traits which companies should

gather about their customers:
– Personality behavior
– Interests
– Values
– Opinions
• Knowing all of this will help the companies to:
– Come up with an accurate list of topics and keywords to target.
– Set up pages to convert more effectively.
– Create a great user experience.
– Optimize the content.
– Craft the perfect message to cause readers to take action.
– Find key influencers in the market.
Step-by-step approach you can use to get to know
your audience

Conduct Market Research

• Market research boosts the effectiveness of an organization’s web strategy
and it’s application in-market.
• The primary goal an any market research is to record as many details as
possible of the target customers, which can later be used to build
individual and group personas.
• Below are a few ways through which this information could be
gathered:
1. Reach Out to Other Departments:
• For example, sales team would have a better idea of what the
prospects need, what are their interest and desires and the
type of questions they put up, or the customer service team
can provide an insight to the pain areas of the customers and
can also help in providing the keywords which can be used for
SEO purposes.
 2. Gather Data Using MarTech Tools

• To help in building a foundation of information, ranging from

demographic data to personal traits, there are plenty of tools
to help gather data about the target audience.
• Below are a few of those tools and what they do:
1. YouGov: YouGov Ratings measures the popularity and fame
of anything and everything, based on millions of responses
from the American public.
2. Demographics Pro: This tool will analyze Twitter and
Instagram profiles to give insights into the followers. It also
allows to analyze competitor profiles and provides large
amount of data.
 3. Research Social Networks
1. Use Social Analytics: Facebook Insights (part of Facebook page) and
Twitter Analytics (go to the Followers tab) will tell a lot about
audience demographics and what they are interested in.
2. Follow Hashtags – On social networks, people share their feelings,
pain points and needs freely – and all companies need to do is
listen and analyze.
• Software solutions like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite let companies
subscribe to a number of hashtags relevant to a website or industry.
• That way companies can see all tweets that are published with
these hashtags attached and should quickly gather what people are
thinking.
3. Join Groups and Communities – Birds of a feather flock
together.
• It is only natural for any audience to come together in interest
groups.
• Whether on LinkedIn, Google+ or elsewhere, try to find out
the top three or four groups that ideal customer engages
with.
• Then observe and join the conversation to find out more
about them.
 4. Conduct Interviews
• Being a time-consuming yet very effective qualitative research
method is to conduct interviews.

• Interviews are generally conducted on a smaller group with

pre- designed questions to mostly reveal the customers /
prospects:
– Personality traits
– Buying preferences
– Interests
– Motivations
1.2.3.Construct Prospective Buyer Personas &
Journeys
• Personas, which are “behavioral, demographic and
psychological profile of audience groups”.
 Below is a sample template to create a marketing persona

• Name – In order to distinguish your different personas

• Work
– Size and type of company as well as industry they work in
– Job description and details about their role
– Responsibilities and people they answer to
• Demographics
• Age – Are your ideal visitors teenagers, twenty-somethings or silver surfers?
• Gender – Does your topic or product appeal more to a male or female
demographic
• Salary – Think of this also in terms of buying power.
• Location – City dwellers or country folk?
• Education – Also think about this in terms of computer literacy.
• Family – What other roles do they fulfill, such as parents, grandparents etc.?
• Hobbies – How do they like to spend their free time?
• Interests – Blogs they read, where they get their news and so on.
• Goals and Challenges
– What are their life goals?
– What challenges are they facing on the way?
– How can you help?
• Values and Fears
– What is important to them?
– What keeps them up at night?
1.2.4. Establishing the Content Ideation &
Creation Framework
• Marketing team should always follow a content
strategy which is equally understood by various
content creators such as
– copywriters,
– designers,
– producers,
– analysts,
– SEO experts etc.,
• to eliminate any confusion and streamline content
creation across platforms.
• Primarily, there are two ways to succeed in content creation
and promotion:
– Be the first one to break a story, OR
– Be the best one to tell it (10x Content)

10x Content: Content that is 10 times better than the best result that
can currently be found in the search results for a given keyword phrase
or topic.
 Tips to create a 10x content
– Attract and earns links
– Exemplify your expertise in your industry
– Rank for keywords/search terms that will have impact for
your campaign
– Generate leads and customers for the business
 Criteria for 10x Content
– a uniquely positive user experience through interface, colors,
visuals, layout, fonts, patterns, etc.
– Delivers content of high-quality, trustworthy, useful, interesting,
and remarkable value
– Is considerably different in scope and detail from other works on
similar topics
– Loads quickly and is usable on any device or browser
– Creates an emotional response of wonder, surprise, joy,
eagerness, and/or appreciation
– Has achieved an impressive quantity of amplification (through
shares on social networks and/or links)
– Solves a problem or answers a question by providing complete,
accurate, exceptional information or resources.
 Examples of 10x content
• https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-
paul-ford-what-is-code/
• http://www.r2d3.us/visual-intro-to-machine-
learning-part-1/
• https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2015/03/opi
nion/ctl-child-poverty/#0
• https://clickclickclick.click/#9bffa0e3cd15afe541c
c4d635f9eaba7
• https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/cont
ests/photographer-of-the-year-
2018/wallpapers/winners-all/5/
 How to Brainstorm Content Ideas
• Every content needs an idea,
• a unique identifier which can be linked to customer personas
• it would act as a catalyst between the audience and the
company.
• Below are a few major sources from where content creators
can get the initiation ideas:
– Industry-specific articles
– YouTube
– SlideShare
– Competitors’ websites
– Popular forums & communities in your space
 The key aspects of content planning
1. Check Topic/Keyword Search Volume:
• Support the content with data.
• Use Google’s Keyword Planner to get an idea of how many
people search for the topic.
• Companies can either bid for the hot topics
or
• Create their own topic/keyword combination to maximize the
reach of the content.
2. Check for Existing Link Opportunities:
• Review the top ranking pages for the topic you want to build
content on.
• See if the ranking pages have substantial # of links pointing to
them.
• page rank: a value assigned to a web page as a measure of its
popularity or importance, used to determine the order in
which search engine results are presented.
Use MozBar extension in chrome
3. Check for the Influencers:
• Are there existing content amplifiers who will be willing to
promote the content once it is published (by sharing or linking
to it) –if given, then is it 10x better than what they have
shared or linked to in the past?
• Reach out to them once your content goes live.
4. Evergreen Topic Litmus Test:
• One way to make the most out of the content ideas/assets is
to ensure that they can provide value to its intended audience
for a long time.
• Search trends can be used to determine the durability of the
topic (use Google Trends).
• Because of it’s enduring online visibility and efficient scaling-
through natural linking, evergreen content works best for any
kind of content marketing campaigns.
• Content should be constantly monitored and updated to
sustain the rankings.
5. UNIQUE VALUE. WHAT’S MISSING FROM YOUR
COMPETITORS’ CONTENT?
• Review your competitors’ content.
• Can you add something about the topic that hasn’t been
written or mentioned from their content, or better –
elsewhere?
• In which you can incorporate the following:
– Internal data
– Case studies
– Survey data
6. RANKABILITY – CAN WE RANK FOR THIS CONTENT/TOPIC’S
SEARCH TERM(S)
• Make sure the content answers the below questions:
1. Is the site enough consistent for the content to rank in a short
period of time?
2. What’s the average site ranking within the top 10, for the target
keyword(s)?
3. How many links do we need to get to the top page of Google?
4. How do we build links to this content?
5. Will influencers really link or share this content?
6. Will this content idea be genuinely 10 times better than what’s
currently ranking #1 in Google?
• If the last 2 questions can be answered confidently, there
would be high chances of content being available to the top
spectrum of search engines.
 1.2.5 Creative Design Principles
• Creating a beautiful design is all about creating a harmony
among the various design elements to combining the same
with a great imagination, which then comes out as a final
product.
• Use a wide variety of online and offline tools to create graphic
designs.
• Design principles are the basic unit of any visual piece, like
painting, drawing or designing that are into existence.
 The design principles which should be
followed when creating any graphic
• LINE
• COLOR
• SHAPE
• TEXTURE
• SIZE & SCALE
• DIRECTION
• PROXIMITY
• BALANCE
• ALINGMENT
• CONTRAST
Alignment
Balance
Color
Contrast
Proximity
Proximity
 1.2.6 Linking Blogs to Social Network
(Conversation Blogs)

• Used by both big and small size companies

• To establish a strong online presence
• To redirect the audience to their website.
• Blogs can be great medium to express and write about a
passion.
• It can be dedicated to life topics such as health and lifestyle,
fitness etc.
• Blog promotion is key, irrespective whether it’s an individual
or a company concern.
• Also, social media websites have evolved, and it has become
easy for the companies to promote blogs and increase traffic.
Ways to link the blogs to social networks:

• Create a social networking page for the Blog

• Add Blog Links to Social Media Profiles
• Schedule Tweets/Posts
• Focus on the Communities
– Post Your Content in Several Groups
– Message Your Connection in These Groups
• Embrace the Visual Power
– Capture the Attention of Your Audience
– Break the Text
– Add Some Colors to It
• Don’t be a Spammer
PART-III
1.3 CONTENT PROMOTION
 Content Promotion
• Goal is to attract a given target audience.
• It neither has any sales pitch nor does it try to directly
advertise or sell a brand, product or service.
• It aims to provide a lasting effect with:
– valuable, relevant information that is educational,
entertaining and/or emotionally satisfying.
– Expand their customer base
– Increase brand awareness or trustworthiness.
– Engage an online community of users
 SEO – Search Engine Optimization
• It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,”
“editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.

• Definition: According to Wikipedia, SEO is

“the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web
page in a search engine’s unpaid results (organic ).”
• Organic search is a method for entering one or several
search terms as a single string of text into a search engine.

• Organic search results, appear as paginated lists, are based on

relevance to the search terms; and exclude advertisements.
• Whereas, non-organic search results do not filter out pay per
click advertising.
 Search Engines
• A search engine is a program that identifies files (weblinks
and related information) in its database based on a keyword
(search query) added by the user and returns results
accordingly.
• The common search engines being used are Google, Yahoo,
Bing etc.
Why are Search engines important for businesses:

• Search engines are usually the first point of contact for anyone when it
comes to finding what they want online,
• The statistics show that over 40% go on to make a purchase / conversion.
• If a website isn’t optimized for specific keywords search
listing, then it is practically invisible to your online target
audience.
• Having an effective and useful website would act like a 24-hour
online sales representative that will be consistently available to
prospective clients.
• Appearing in the search engine’s natural listings is completely free
of charge making search engine optimization extremely cost
effective and producing a positive ROI.
• 75% of searchers start their searches on Google.
https://www.zerolimitweb.com
• the first five results on Google get 67% of all clicks,
https://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx
• There’s a joke going around the web that highlights how
crucial it is to hit the first page of Google:

• If you ever need to hide a dead body, you

should place it on the second page of Google
search results.
1.3.1. Implementing SEO as ART and as Science

Here are 4 ways why SEO is a science:

1. Research is required
• SEO without research is like swimming without water
- it’s required! SEO needs research within:

– Google’s algorithm (to understand the facts of how it works)

– Your website’s audience (to understand what kind of content they
want)
– Keywords (to understand what those people are searching for)
2. Numbers drive critical functions
• Numbers provide guidelines in some critical parts to SEO like:
– 50 to 60 (optimal character length of Meta Title)
– 150 to 160 (optimal character length of Meta Description)
– 100 (having keyword in the first hundred words of a page’s content is
relevancy factor)
– 115 or under (optimal URL length)
– 4 or under (the number of seconds your website should load)
3. Formulas are the brain of search engines
• Google’s algorithm changes 500-600 times a year and Google
is on record for saying there are 200 different ranking
factors (some more important than others).
4. Observation is ongoing
• Though an initial on-page optimization can last for years, SEO,
in general is ongoing.
• You need to watch how your strategy unfolds, find new
keywords, create new content, fix crawl errors and account for
algorithm changes
 Why SEO is an Art
• Here are 4 ways why SEO is an Art:
1. Compelling, Concise and Clickable Copy
• The metadata that shows in the results page has a restriction
on the number of characters.
• So, do you jam in as many keywords as possible? Or, do you
write convincing copy that’ll get clicks? If you approach your
SEO artfully, you’ll do the latter.
2. Clear, Smart Keyword Hierarchy & Structure

What option will drive better SEO results?

A: Throw every keyword applicable to your business on every page of your

site?
B: Design an architecture that places keywords on individual pages?

Correct answer = ?
3. Not falling victim to generically naming links “Click Here”
• Naming your links “click here” negatively impacts SEO
(http://uxmovement.com/content/why-your-links-should-never-say-click-here/).
• It lacks the artful approach that search engine bots are
seeking to understand how content and pages connect.
4. UX now impacts SEO (and great UX demands an artful
approach)
• Your website’s UX is now a mobile ranking factor (and may
impact desktop rankings in the future, possibly).
• In other words, bad mobile design = bad mobile rankings.
 1.3.2. Ranking Algorithms
• A good search engine does not attempt to return the pages
that best match the input query.

• A good search engine tries to answer the underlying question.

• Search Engines like Google use many elements and aspects,

commonly referred to as “signals” in their algorithm to
determine relevance.
• Such signals are
– the usage of the term in the Title tag,
– Heading,
– URL
– the proximity of the keyword to the beginning of the content.
• Others include such things as
– links from other websites;
– the relevance of the page the link originates from;
– the text of the link and the page that link is pointing to.
• Google states that they utilize over 200 signals in their ranking
algorithms.
 1. Text-Based Ranking Algorithm
• It finds how similar each sentence is to all other sentences in
the text.

• It extracts words from sentences and follows the same

algorithm,

• Using a similarity function between words that can be used to

TextRank with extracted keywords from the text.

• The idea is that the word is most similar to all the other
words and hence the most important one.
Ranking Parameters
• Summarizing Text
• How many sentences to use in the summary
• Which similarity function use to compare sentences

https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2018/11
/introduction-text-summarization-textrank-
python/
 2. Hyperlink Induced Topic Search (HITS)

• Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search (HITS; also known as hubs and

authorities).
• It is a link analysis algorithm that rates Web pages.
• The idea behind Hubs and Authorities stemmed from a
particular insight into the creation of web pages when the
Internet was originally forming.
 HITS
• Certain web pages, known as hubs,
• Hubs served as large directories
• Hubs are reliable in the information that they held,
• Hubs are used as compilations of a broad catalog of
information that led users direct to other authoritative pages.
• A good hub represented a page that pointed to many other
pages
• A good authority represented a page that was linked by many
different hubs.
 HITS
HITS concludes two main values for a page:
1) Page Authority: which estimates the value of the content of
the page
2) Page hub value: which estimates value of its links to other
pages.

Jon Kleinberg develop the HITS (hyperlink-induced topic

search) algorithm which is now part of the Ask search engine
 HITS
• The algorithm performs a series of iterations, each consisting of two
basic steps:
Hub Update:
• It updates every node’s hub score to be equal to the sum of the
authority score’s of every node that points to it.
• That is, a node is given a high hub score by linking to nodes that are
considered to be authorities on the subject.

Authority Update:
• It updates every node’s authority score to be equal to the sum of
the hub score’s of every node that points to it.
• That is, a node is given a higher authority score by being linked to
pages that are recognized as hubs for information.
 3. PageRank Algorithm
• PageRank is an algorithm used by the Google search engine to
measure the authority of a webpage.
According to Google:
• PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links
to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the
website is.
• The underlying assumption is that more important websites
are likely to receive more links from other websites.
• Page Rank algorithm assumes that if a page has a link to
another page then it votes for that page.
• Therefore, each inlink to a page raises its importance.
• PageRank is a recursive algorithm in which the PageRank of a
page depends upon the PageRank of the pages linking to it.
• Thus, not only the number of inlinks of a page influences its
ranking but also the page ranks of the pages linking to it.
• PageRank is often considered to be a number between 0 and
10 (with 0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest) though
that is also probably incorrect.
• This is a rough approximation, as Google does not release its
most up to date PageRank as a way of protecting the
algorithm's details.
• Finally, and perhaps most importantly, PageRank is just one of
many factors that Google uses to decide where a site appears
in search rankings for a particular query.
• PageRank Intuition
– “Page is important if many important pages point
to it”
• Many pages point to Yahoo!, so it is “important”
• Because Yahoo! is important, anyone it prominently
points to is “important
 4. Weighted Page Rank Algorithm
• Wenpu Xing and Ali Ghorbani projected a Weighted PageRank
(WPR) algorithm which is a modification to the PageRank
algorithm.
• This algorithm assigns a larger rank values to the more important
pages rather than dividing the rank value of a page evenly among
its outgoing linked pages.
• Each outgoing link gets a value proportional to its importance.

• The importance is assigned in terms of weight values to the

incoming and outgoing links.

• The results of simulation studies show that WPR performs better

than the conventional PageRank algorithm in terms of returning a
larger number of relevant pages to a given query.
 5. Distance Ranking Algorithm
• It is a novel recursive method based on reinforcement learning which
considers distance between pages as punishment, called ‘‘DistanceRank’’
to compute ranks of web pages.
• The distance is defined as minimum number of average clicks that a user
requires to reach from page i to another page j.
• Since related pages have been usually linked to each other, the distanced
based solution can find pages with high qualities more quickly.
• In other words, each page that has less average distance from others has a
higher rank.
• The objective is to minimize punishment or distance so that a page with
less distance to have a higher rank.
6. Topic Sensitive Page Ranking Algorithm

• Topic-Sensitive PageRank (commonly referred to as TSPR) is a

context-sensitive ranking algorithm for web search developed
by Taher Haveliwala while at Stanford University.

• Thought to be used by Google for the purpose of indexing and

ranking search results in the search engine results pages,
although no evidence has been shown of it in practice.
• TSPR, pre-compute the importance scores of a page, offline,
as with ordinary PageRank.
• However, TSPR compute multiple importance scores for each
page;
• It compute a set of scores of the importance of a page with
respect to various topics.
• At query time, these importance scores are combined based
on the topics of the query to form a composite PageRank
score for those pages matching the query.
• This score can be used in conjunction with other IR-based
scoring schemes to produce a final rank for the result pages
with respect to the query.
 1.3.3. Website Audit
• When a user enters a search query and if the size of the query
is lengthy, it is difficult for the search engine to match all the
keywords present in the query.
• The user refines the query until he gets the required results.
• The most challenging issue in most of the search engines is
retrieval of most relevant web pages which are arranged from
top to bottom based on the user preference and ranking.
• A website audit by the search engines comprises of Web
Mining, Crawling, Indexing and Ranking on websites to
assess and to provide better placement in search results.
 Web Mining
• Web mining is the application of data mining techniques to
discover patterns from the World Wide Web.
• It makes utilization of automated tools to reveal and extract
data from servers and web2 reports,
• It permits organizations to get to both organized and
unstructured information from browser activities, server logs,
website and link structure, page content and different
sources.
• Web Mining: can be further classified into below
categories:
1. Web Usage Mining
2. Web Content Mining
3. Web Structure Mining
 1. Web Usage Mining

Web usage mining

• This is the process of extracting patterns and information
from server logs to gain insight on user activity including
– where the users are from,
– how many clicked
– what item on the site and
– the types of activities being done on the site.
 2. Web Content Mining

Web content mining

• This is the process of mining useful information from the
contents of Web pages and Web documents, which are mostly
text, images and audio/video files.
• Techniques used in this discipline have been heavily drawn
from natural language processing (NLP) and information
retrieval.
 3. Web Structure Mining

Web structure mining

• This is the process of analyzing the nodes and connection
structure of a website through the use of graph theory.
• There are two things that can be obtained from this:
– the structure of a website in terms of how it is connected to other
sites and
– the document structure of the website itself, as to how each page is
connected.
 Crawling
• Crawling involves acquisition of data about a site.
• It scans the site and gets a complete list of the web page
– titles,
– pictures,
– keywords it contains and
– links to other pages.
• Now-a-days, crawlers read a copy of the complete page and
the additional information like page layout and links on the
web page.
 Indexing
• Indexing is the process of reading the data from crawler and
storing the data in a large database.
• All the data is stored in cast data centers.
• It is designed on factors like merging, storage techniques,
index size, lookup speed, maintenance and fault tolerance.
• In layman’s terms, Indexing is the process of adding web
pages into Google search.
• A good idea for ranking higher in search engines is to let only
vital parts of your blog/website be indexed.
• Do not index unnecessary archives like tags, categories, and
all other useless pages.
 Ranking
• Ranking or retrieval is the process when the user enters a
search query and the search engine displays the most relevant
pages it finds that matches the query and this is also the most
complicated step.
• It is reduced to computation of numeric scores and is based
on the factors like relevance feedback and page frequency.
1.3.5 Decoding Common Paid Media Platforms

• Paid media refers to external marketing efforts that involve a

paid placement.
• Paid media includes PPC(Pay Per Click) advertising, branded
content, and display ads.
• Paid media is an essential component of revenue growth and
brand awareness for any online businesses.
• One of the most effective solutions is affiliate marketing.
• Affiliate marketing is known as a marketing technique and
practice in which a single business rewards single or more
affiliates for bringing customers or visitors through the
principles of affiliate marketing.
• In other words, as a publisher, you would be rewarded when
you support another business by promoting their services or
products.
 Affiliate Marketing techniques
• Pay per sale: In this affiliate program, the merchant pays the
percentage of the sales price when the purchase is fully done.

• Pay per lead: Publisher is paid just once and that too when
the referred customers or visitors will provide the target site
their contact information by filling the contact form.

• Pay per click: This is the most common program in affiliate

marketing. With this type of affiliate marketing, publisher will
be paid based on the number of visitors you send to the
merchant ’s website.
 1.3.6 Black Hat, White Hat and Grey Hat SEO

White Hat SEO

• White hat strategies follow all the rules.
• To properly conduct white hate SEO, businesses need to look
at all the latest Google recommendations for proper SEO
etiquette and what they like to see in content, and the advice
to be followed.
• Today, white hat practices depend primarily on real human
users to increase page rankings and almost entirely ignore
bots.
• If bots or automatic analysis help, that ’s all to the good, but
white practices don’t lend itself to dedicated bot strategies.
• It’s focus is primarily on people.
• This approach comes with several marketing benefits.
• It tends to favor engagement or discussion, which helps to
develop client relationships more easily.
• It also helps to get into the habit of developing stronger
content.
• White hat tactics are getting easier these days.
Grey Hat SEO
• Grey hat refers to many techniques which resides in the grey
area of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
• Often, although not specifically prohibited, they also don’t
exactly follow the spirit of the white hat advice given
elsewhere and may be techniques that Google could crack
down in the future.
• Grey hat strategies avoid anything that’s explicitly banned or
discouraged, but step freely everywhere else.
• Here the technical details are still important, and marketers
are willing to use bots and other automatic forms of analysis
to give their page rankings a bump.
• Grey hat is an effective way to give the content a starting
boost, especially while developing a new website.
• A good example is, using link distribution tools to
automatically spread the content to applicable platforms.
• The problem with a grey hat approach is that it focuses on
poorly defined SEO techniques.
• In other words, many of these grey tactics have been ignored by
search engines or not actually allowed.
• Grey hat practices are always moving toward either white hat
status, or black hat bans, and the bans tend to be more common.
• This means that if companies use any grey hat methods, they must
keep up with any official or apparent changes to SEO algorithms.
• For example, “article spinning” or writing a new article that
plagiarize the content of a similar article (found somewhere
online) is currently grey hat,
• But Google may create more stringent analysis in the future that
marks you down for articles that look too much like copies, even
if your wording is different.
Black Hat SEO
• Black hat strategies are tricks that are directly banned,
discouraged and punished by search engines.
• They involve plenty of automatic tools and bots that replicate
vast amounts of content, as well as paying for cheap links,
keyword stuffing, copying content to claim as own, hidden
text, and other cheap methods.
• These can give a sharp boost in rankings, followed quickly by
the website getting banned.
• Black hat SEO is which directly flies in the face of Google’s
stated rules.
• Although Google’s current algorithm is considerably more
intelligent than previous iterations, there are still gaps in the
net through which sites using black hat techniques can
squeeze.
• Most often, these techniques are limited to small niche sites,
but occasionally, bigger sites are caught leveraging black hat
methods.