The last few years have seen a surge in Smartphone traffic. However, conversion still remains a daunting task for most e-commerce sites.

The 2015 quarterly reports of various Digital Marketing companies reflect that there has been a tremendous growth in Smartphone traffic; although saying that the Smartphone transactions remained flat.

According to the reports (drawn from various client bases):

• Smartphone traffic swelled to 269 percent over Quarter 1, which was 27 percent of the overall traffic received.
• Additionally, Smartphone orders increased to about 104 percent, accounting to 13 percent of all transactions made online.

Despite the influx of mobile shoppers, Desktop users still spend the most on buying online. The recorded sales on an average for Desktop users amounted to 54.8% in the first quarter, versus 27% for Smartphone and 19% for Tablet-based shoppers.

Improving User Experience

Often users complain about how gruesome their e-commerce experience is – especially when using a mobile phone. They often complain about secure payment gateways.

The idea of asking someone to register, enter personal details and credit/debit card information on a Smartphone is usually not well accepted by customers. To counter this issue, many companies have started implementing the “remember me” feature.

The need for the hour is innovation. If you really wish to scale your e-commerce website up the profit bandwagon, it’s time to switch to a mobile responsive website!

If you were relying on guest blogging to gain quality links until now, then you should beware of Google’s dangerous animals, Penguin and Panda.
In a recent blog, Matt Cutt clearly said “Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.” It’s very clear from his blog that Google is currently viewing guest posting as spammy.
However, this doesn’t mean that guest blogging will end altogether. Some great multi-author blogs will continue to be enriching and enlightening for the readers, and guest posts that are not meant for SEO purposes. However, what is currently the biggest concern of online marketers is what would happen to link building now that guest blogging, another link building tactic, has been devalued.
Many link building methods that worked well till recent years are now on Google’s hit list. Google wants everyone to focus on content rather than building links. But what if one can earn link… yes it can boost your online marketing campaign!
This can easily be done by using quality content, which Google loves, as a base for implementing link earning tactics, mainly through integrated online marketing. Any promotional tactic including social media, paid advertising, community forums or organic promotion can’t work without high quality and authoritative content. Creating qualitative content and sharing it with target audience who will share it, will bring links naturally.
You can connect with influential people, and share their views by mentioning their name in your blog, publishing their interviews etc., and attributing your content. Infographics is also a great way to generate interest in your content and make it sharable. You can also use paid social ads on social networking and promotional sites including Twitter, Reddit, and Stumbleupon to promote your content. Last and the most important of all, share it on Google Plus, a sure shot way to get promoted.
Use these, content cum online marketing strategies to earn links. You can still continue guest blogging, as long as it is legitimate and you’re willing to share your knowledge!

The popularity of your website and its position in the search engine ranking is a very crucial factor that one must take care of. Search engine ranking is based on various parameters such as the header, the URL, the quality of the inbound links and the speed at which the web page loads.

This means that it is directly related to your web performance, which obviously means being related to end user experience. There are various factors involved that determine this. Viz. the code, the backend performance tuning, the tracking scripts on every page.

Research results show that there is a relation between the website speed and the TTFB (Time to first Byte). A faster (or smaller) TTFB resulted in a higher ranking from the search engine.

Understanding TTFB:

So, we need to improve our TTFB! For that lets understand what it is and how it is determined.

When a connection is requested to a particular website, following steps take place. There is DNS Lookup, connection is requested, and waiting time till a connection is received, time to receive the data and finally closing the connection. The time to first byte is the time that is spends in the entire above process that is waiting for the web-server to send back the data.

Determining the TTFB time:

Webpage Test is an open source tool, which shows the website performance by a means of a chart. Select a location from where your end-user would be and website address and run the test. In about half a minute the tool generates a waterfall chart that explains the resources of the website and the response time for each. This also includes TTFB.

Top ranking websites have a TTFB of about 350ms; however an ideal TTFB time would be anything less than 500ms. If the TTFB is found to be higher, (which means the website is slow), it would mainly be because of Latency.

Understanding Latency:

Latency is the time taken to transmit one packet of data from one end to another. If someone complained of lower latency, normally one would suggest increasing the bandwidth. However this does not really help reduce latency time! Owing to the fact that latency is measured on the distance that the packet has to travel. This distance cannot be reduced by increasing the connection bandwidth.

To achieve the ideal TTFB time, the latency time for a website should be roughly 100 ms (data packet travels to the server and back), so that the rest of the 400 ms is spend on comfortably loading the page.

Finally, improving latency and hence improving TTFB:

From the above it becomes obvious that if the distance that the data packet travels is reduced, we can reduce latency time, reduce TTFB and thus increase the website ranking.

A classic manner in which this can be achieved is to use CDNs – Content Delivery Network. One must move all the static data of the website to a CDN, CDNs automatically replicate this data to multiple locations spread out geographically. Thus if a website is published somewhere in North America, it will be replicated onto a server in Australia so that users in Australia have a better experience.