Wednesday, September 12, 2007

The-Top-10-Tools-For-Monitoring-The-Success-Of-Your-Website

1 Google Analytics

Google Analytics has become the preferred option among frëe statistics programs. Like any other stats program, Google Analytics provides data on the number of visitors, and page views, referral sources, entry and exit pages, and more. Unlike most other programs, Google Analytics includes the ability to track and monitor pay-per-clíck (PPC) campaigns. Other useful information includes the geographic location of your visitors, their internet connection speed, and their screen resolutions. You can sign up for Google Analytics at:

2 Google Webmaster Tools

Want to know how the largest search engine in the world sees your website? Google's Webmaster Tools will give you loads of information such as the pages that are indexed, errors found by the Googlebot (dead links), your search engine rankings for specific search phrases, your anchor text on inbound links, internal and external link data, and robots.txt and sitemap data.

By knowing how Google sees your site you will find some basic items that you'll need to change in order to reach your maximum potential in search engine traffíc. You can sign up for Google Webmaster Tools at:

3 SEOmoz's Page Strength Tool

SEOmoz is one of the leading search engine optimization (SEO) firms and their website provides a wealth of information through their blog, articles and tools. Their Page Strength Tool shows you the "relative importance and visibility" and the "potential strength and ability of a page to rank in the search engines." SEOmoz provides a quick way to get a basic look at the strength of your page. The Page Strength Tool can be used at:

4 Sitening.com's SEO Analyzer

Sitening is another leading SEO firm with several valuable tools on their website. The SEO Analyzer differs from SEOmoz's Page Strength Tool in that it checks the internal structure of your site to determine how well it is constructed (in terms of search engine optimization). The structure of a website is the framework for a good SEO campaign, and Sitening.com's SEO Analyzer will help you to build the right framework. Sitening.com's SEO Analyzer can be found at:

5 Mike's Marketing Tools

MikesMarketingTools.com has two tools that every webmaster should use regularly. The Search Engine Rankings Tool will show you where your site ranks in several of the top search engines for a specific word or phrase. You can save time by using this tool instead of visiting each search engine and clicking through the search engine results pages to find your website.

The Link Popularity Tool will quickly show you how many inbound links each search engine recognizes for your site. Inbound links are a major factor in search engine rankings and each search engine recognizes a different number of links. From this tool you can also clíck through to see the specific pages that are linking to you. To use these tools visit:

6 Summit Media's Spider Simulator

The spider simulator shows you "how a search engine reacts to your pages and what can be done to boost your usability." Search engine spiders see web pages much differently than human visitors do. A page may look attractive and well-designed to a human visitor, but a search engine spider may not be able to find what it is looking for. This page is a great tool to assure you that your site is built for maximum search engine results. The spider simulator can be used at:

7 SelfSEO Page Speed Checker

Your average website visitor will have a very short attention span. To have the best chance of making a positive first impression on new visitors your page must load quickly enough that they do not leave right away. SelfSEO has a Page Speed Tool that shows you how long your page takes to load. The tool allows you to enter multiple pages to chëck at one time. It is a good idea to compare the load time of your page against pages from several other websites. Try entering your homepage and the homepage of several of your competitors. If your page loads considerably slower than the others, try to make the file smaller by reducing the number and size of images or by cleaning up the coding. The Page Speed Tool can be used at:

8 Dead Links Checker

Having dead links on your website can frustrate visitors and damage your search engine rankings. However, checking all the links on your site manually is not realistic. Fortunately there are a number of tools online that will automate the process. The W3 Link Checker will crawl through your pages and report which links are broken. To use this tool visit:

9 GoogleRankings.com

GoogleRankings.com will show you which words and phrases appear most frequently on your website throughout the text of the page, title, headings and meta tags. This is a useful tool to be certain that your pages are optimized for the words and phrases that you are targeting.

10 FeedBurner

If you publish a blog, FeedBurner's service is a must have. Feedburner will provide you with statistics regarding your blog's feed and you can give your readers the option to subscribe by email instead of RSS. There are a number of other features that you can read about at FeedBurner. With FeedBurner you can always see how many subscribers you have and how many of them are clicking through from your feed to your site.

Article Source: http://www.acmearticles.com


http://www.acmearticles.com/Article/The-Top-10-Tools-For-Monitoring-The-Success-Of-Your-Website/41780

Top-5-Link-Building-Expert-Strategies

Link Popularity is a greatly misunderstood subject among webmasters and online business owners. The major search engines have developed complicated algorithms that rank web pages for relevancy and quality. In determining relevancy, the search engines tend to measure on page factors such as relevant content. For determining quality, the search engines have moved towards inbound links and their quality as a measure of a website’s importance. The rise of link popularity, as a measure of the links pointing to a website, is founded on the belief that great sites will naturally attract many links and content poor sites will have difficulty attracting any links. While Google is the front runner in giving importance to link popularity, other major search engines such as Yahoo, MSN and AltaVista have also given importance to link popularity, making it a critical component of your search engine strategy.

1. High Page Rank – While Page Rank has been somewhat discredited among the elite of the search engine optimizers, the fact remains that Page Rank is by far one of the most viable methods of determining the importance of a web page. Page Rank remains an important, but not a defining element towards establishing link popularity.

2. Permanent Links – Google puts a small restriction or penalty on new websites. This penalty, in part monitors the “age” of the inbound links of a website. This draws on the importance of getting permanent links to increase your link popularity. It will work on eliminating your Sandbox penalties while maintaining the reputation you have built.

3. Site Quality – The quality of a website, as determined by the search engines, is a major factor, along with Page Rank, in establishing the importance of a link.

4. Reciprocal Linking – This is definitely the fastest way to get a ton of links pointing to your website. As long as your link directory is broken down into themed categories, you should most definitely trade links with the other website. You should always trade links with another website no matter if they:

• Have a PR0 page. If you trade links with them, chances are, they’re also actively building links, so this PR0 page will soon be a PR3, PR4, and even more.

• Over 30 links on a links page. Any link will help your rankings, as long as the website you’re exchanging with is not banned. (Gray Google Page Rank).

5. Natural Link Building - The building blocks of site to site linking, as search engines understand and define it. Search engines justify using link popularity as a ranking tool with the idea that good quality sites will naturally attract links.

Article Source: http://www.acmearticles.com


http://www.acmearticles.com/Article/Top-5-Link-Building-Expert-Strategies/41664

Why-Trackbacks-are-Useful-For-Blogs

If not, that’s alright, as most people don’t quite understand how trackbacks work and why they are useful for a blog. In this newsletter, we’re going to go over trackbacks—what they are, how they work, why they are important to blog traffic, and how to get more trackbacks. After you’ve read this, you’ll know practically everything there is to know about trackbacks.

What are trackbacks?
The concept of trackbacks is a bit hard to explain. So we’ll use an example to explain it in the best way possible.

OK, say you see a great blog post on another person’s blog and want to link to it on your blog. You could do this the old-fashioned way by manually putting a link on your site to that blog. However, if you do it this way, the person whose blog post you are linking to won’t know that you are linking to them unless you tell them.

This is where trackbacks come in. A trackback is a program which will notify the owner of a blog when one of their posts has been linked to at another blog.

How do they work?
A blog that has a trackback system set up will have a link at the bottom of every blog post. This link will say something like “Blog This!” Anyone who clicks the link can then put a link to that blog post on their site. The person who posted the original blog will then be notified via email that their blog posting has been linked to. Additionally, the link that was clicked(“Blog This!”) will change to “Trackbacks”. From that point forward, the “Trackbacks” link will keep track of how many people have chosen to blog about that particular post. So after the first trackback, it will say “Trackbacks: 1”. The number of trackbacks recorded will be updated as they occur.

Why are trackbacks important to blog traffic?
The easy answer is that trackbacks are important because they increase awareness of your blog. Trackbacks also make a blog seem more credible. After all, people have to think your posts are good enough to be trackbacked.

Anytime a person makes a trackback on your blog, they make a post on their own blog about your blog. This, in turn, lets their readers know about your blog. Chances are, their readers will want to visit your blog to see what the big deal is. If they see something on your blog that they like, they’ll keep coming back for more, which means you’ll have a whole new fanbase of readers. That means more traffic for your blog.

Can you imagine what would happen if 5 different bloggers trackbacked a post on your blog? Depending on how popular their blog is, that’s potentially as much as hundreds of new readers for your blog! Pretty incredible, right?

Also, every trackback made, assuming it is a legitimate one (and some trackbacks are spam, especially if they are there only to link to another site) adds credibility to your blog. Blogs with high amounts of trackbacks look credible because lots of people like the posts enough to trackback them.

How can I increase the number of trackbacks I get?
The easiest and best way to increase trackbacks is to frequently post. If you post frequently (2-3 times a week), people will have quite a few posts that they can trackback. However, it is important to make sure that your posts are of a good quality. Quality blog posts are those that people can relate to and are easy to read. If you post a long boring rant, people probably won’t want to trackback that. But if you post a decent sized rant that is entertaining (and that people are likely to agree with), you’ll get trackbacked.

The number of trackbacks you get is totally dependent on the number of visitors your blog receives and how frequently you are able to make quality posts. If you’ve got a good amount of visitors and write good blog posts, you’ll get trackbacks.

Trackbacks are a wonderful thing for every blog. You are able to know when your blog posting has been posted about at another blog, plus you potentially gain more visitors. It’s a win-win situation for you!

Article Source: http://www.acmearticles.com


Terry Detty, 42 and genuinely happy individual, enjoys all aspects of internet marketing and occasionally enjoys going out for a brisk walk. fix my credit and email marketing resources

Search-Engine-Directory-specializes-in-Niche-Vertical-Markets

A niche market or a vertical market is a group of similar kinds of businesses that engage in a trade based on specialized needs of customers or buyers. The people who participate in a vertical market are usually a smaller portion of a larger industry or market. This kind of market is designed specially for a similar customer base.
Participants in vertical markets aim at solving the same kinds of problems within that specific portion. These markets can be competitive because of an overlapping focus on the services and products that are being offered to many customers.

In horizontal markets, the participants attempt to meet the needs through gaining a presence in the vertical market. They have similar products and services and they are less of a fit with each other.

When it comes to search engine marketing and search engine promotion, you can’t afford to go at it in the wrong way. You have to make sure that your site is listed with only quality sites and quality search engines like http://www.urascal.com

If you are not making sure to do your research and to take care to be listed with quality sites, then the traffic that you get may not be quality either. Ultimately, you want quality traffic that will buy your products and services and you get this by being in niche vertical markets.

When you are doing search engine marketing and search engine promotion, you may have had the problem of exchanging links with other webmasters. There are thousands of links to be exchanged. You don’t have time to check and make sure they put a reciprocal link on their site. URascal.com will solve this problem for you once and for all. They have a staff that verifies the link exchange.

An actual human being reviews each and every single web site. This is to ensure that there are only quality web sites in the URascal.com search engine program. You are free to submit your site for approval. URascal.com has a variety of niche topics that are available to you. This is definitely a valuable tool for your search engine marketing and search engine promotion efforts.

Cost of joining URascal.com is free of charge.

Article Source: http://www.acmearticles.com

About author:
About Urascal.com URascal.com is an Internet search engine and directory categorized by topic. It includes both general and specialty topics and is hand edited. We are on the web at www.urascal.com

Get-Your-Site-Listed-Quickly-In-Search-Engines

These ways include submitting the URL, using keywords, using links, and using blogs to get listed quick.

Tip #1: Submit your URL manually to search engines

Search engines like Google, Altavista and Yahoo all have options for you to manually submit your site. Before submitting, however, it is important to make sure of the following:

1. All pages on your site are complete. Search engine spiders won’t touch incomplete sites.

2. Your site is not full of spam and/or excessive use of keywords. Yet again, spiders won’t touch spam sites, which means your site will be skipped over if it contains lots of spam.

When you submit the site, make sure to submit it only once to each search engine. Submitting multiple times to the same search engine will get you no where. In fact, they might keep your site from ever having a chance at being listed on the search engine.

Tip #2: Use keywords to get spiders to come to your site

Search engine spiders absolutely love sites with good, well-placed and well-used keywords and key phrases. In other newsletters, we have covered the correct use of keywords and key phrases, so you might already be familiar with it. If not, we’ll briefly touch on it right now.

Keywords are words that are used frequently on a site that search engines look for. The key to correct usage of keywords is to make them fit naturally throughout a piece of content and not look like spam. Before writing your content for your site, take a second to decide what the content is about. Then make a list of keywords or key phrases that seem to fit with the topic at hand. Next, write the content and try to sprinkle in the keywords or key phrases throughout the content in a natural, non-distracting way. When you are done writing the content, you should count the number of keywords or key phrases. Then divide that by the total number of words in content. If the number you get is between 1-3%, you’re good to go. If it’s below 1%, try to naturally add in keywords or key phrases. If it’s above 5%, try to take out keywords or key phrases. Aim for the perfect balance of between 1 and 3%.

Tip #3: Use links

Having another site link to you will make spiders that visit the first site come to your site as a result of the link. Many owners of sites related to yours are happy to post a link to your site on their links page. Some might require what is called “reciprocal linking”. This basically means that if they place a link to your site on their page, they want you to return the favor by posting a link to their page on your site. Doing so helps both sites better gain the attention of search engine spiders and helps them both to get listed quickly.

Tip #4: Install a blog on your site

Blogs are extremely popular and quickly listed by search engines. Places like Google are known to index(or list a site/blog) far faster than they list regular web sites. Blogs are listed by search engines like Google within days of being created, whereas it can take weeks and months for search engines to notice a site.
Installing a blog on your site is really easy. All you have to do is install a program such as WordPress on your web site and then use that to make blog postings. If you run a sports site, for instance, you could try making twice a week posts on the blog about sports news. Doing so will help your site as a whole get noticed quicker by search engines.
If you apply just one of the tips above to your web site, you will get listed quicker than expected.

Creating a blog on your web site is quicker than ever before. Do it today and watch how quickly and effortlessly your site gets listed on search engines!

Article Source: http://www.acmearticles.com

About author:
Terry Detty finds press release services and SEO marketing software his passion. In addition to marketing, he enjoys reading and occasionally goes out for a short walk. His latest interest is a newtime and attendance program he's been using.

Why-Targeted-Link-Building-is-Important

If you have a web site and want to get it out there, you'll have to do some Internet marketing to get listed high up in the search engines. One of the ways to do this is to carry out link building. What exactly is link building? Link building is really about putting yourself in the online marketplace as a competitive force in the industry in which you are based.

Link building is a great way to get yourself out there and have customers find you online. Putting together a good link building campaign is not very easy, so it should be well worth it in the end. Sometimes though, all the effort seems wasted. This is just because you haven't done link building the proper way.

The first thing to do is to get your business listed in a good directory such as http://www.premierdir.net. It is a high quality directory and quality matters a lot even when it comes to link building. Always get listed in sites that will get you noticed. Don't waste your time and effort to get listed in too many directories that won't get your site noticed by anyone that matters.

Depending on your business you would know where your potential customers will come from. Most people start researching online from Google and go on to look in directories. Others read articles and product reviews, and search through discussion groups to look at competitors. On the basis of this information you should be able to create a good link building strategy.

All the sites that your customers visit when doing this research are the sites that are related to your industry. These are the sites you should be listed on because they relate to the product or service you're selling. This is the most natural way to build links and get people to find your site and buy your product.

Basically, you should look for sites that relate to your business and not those that have good page ranks. These links will connect you to your customers. And that is where you would want to be. If you are selling a product, for instance, you should try to get listed in the shopping section of a quality directory. They will list you under the category that relates to your particular industry. Here is an example link: www.premierdir.net/Shopping.

Essentially, link building only works if you target the right market. There's no point in building links in places where the people don't care about what you're selling. However, target the right people and potential customers, and you will have hit the jackpot.

So part of the research process will be to figure out what industries and niches relate to your product or service most closely, which is the best way to target the right market from the start. You may want to create a ranking of industries and websites that relate your business. This way you'll be able to prioritize your link building strategy.

For example, if you are selling furnishings, concentrate your search for portals that relate to furnishing and other related industries and get listed there. You will hit the jackpot in no time.

Article Source: http://www.acmearticles.com

About Author

Author James Mark is a webmaster who has recently established Premier Directory, a collection of directories, such as his Premier Shopping Directory, that contain info and links to other websites.

An-Analysis-of-Directory-Submissions

Objectives of Directory Submission

Webmasters submit their sites to directories with three main objectives:

* Get permanent one-way links to their sites,

* Get links from high-PR sources and

* Get interested visitors looking for the kind of info their site provides.

Let us look at the significance and practicalities of these objectives.

One-way Links from Directories

The whole thing started with Google. Webmasters are eager to get top positions in Google search results because that brings them highest traffic. So they began to seek out things that "please" Google. And found the value of links.

Google considers a link from Site A to Site B as a vote in favor or Site B, indicating that Site B contains good content. And it would also seem that if Site B includes a return-link to Site A, the weight of the original vote goes down. It is believed widely that Google looks unfavorably on reciprocal links.

One-way links could come automatically if your site has super-value content. If your site contains info that adds value to other sites (or is exceptionally cool), the latter might insert links pointing to your site. However, this is a tall order that few webmasters could hope to execute.

The major remaining alternatives for getting one-ways links are two.

* Write articles with an author byline that includes a link to your site, or

* Get your site listed in a directory.

Writing articles was not easy. Nor could everyone write good articles. So most webmasters went after directories.

Suddenly, a new business came into existence, the business of publishing directories. However, many of these new directories were shoddy works. Quite a few were just link farms for exchanging links among themselves, irrespective of the relevance of such links.

Google began to penalize listings in such directories. In fact, it had a favorite directory, DMOZ, a listing in which carried high weight in Google’s ranking algorithm.

Soon, webmasters began to flock to DMOZ. DMOZ being a directory compiled by unpaid volunteers, there was soon a serious shortage of editors to review the innumerable submissions. DMOZ has now become notorious for the delay in reviewing sites. Years could pass before your site is reviewed if ever.

Worse, DMOZ has also become a very corruption-prone setup. Webmasters were willing to do anything to get into DMOZ. DMOZ decision-makers for one reason or another does not seem to welcome new editors who could have reduced the workload.

Editors have no obligation to review sites in the order of submission. So, if you could influence a DMOZ editor, you could get your site reviewed quicker.

It would be a surprise if many editors and webmasters did not exploit this situation to their advantage. And reports do indicate that malpractices are prevalent in DMOZ.

So what do you do in such a situation?

You search out directories with good Page Ranks. That brings us to the second objective of directory submission.

Get Links from High-PR Directories

We mentioned earlier that Google considers a link from Site A to Site B as indicative of Site B’s value. However, not all links are equal in weight. A link from a high-PR site (a site with a high Google Page Rank) carries more weight.

If a directory has high PR, it would mean that Google has assessed that directory and found it a worthy source of info. A link to your site from such a directory could not but carry some weight.

If the link is from a highly relevant category (considering your site’s topic) the weight would be even more.

Get Targeted Traffic from Directories

Some directories, like the Yahoo directory, are quite popular and used by Web surfers to find information they seek. A listing in such directories could bring many visitors and that too visitors specifically interested in the topic of your site.

A Yahoo listing could bring both Google ranking improvement as well as traffic. However, a Yahoo listing does not come cheap. They charge $300 just to review your site, with no guarantee of inclusion. And if your site is accepted, you have to pay $300 annually to keep it there.

In addition to Yahoo, there are specialized directories like Business.com that could bring targeted traffic to your site. Find out directories that specialize in your niche and assess their popularity. You might find at least one or two excellent sources of traffic.

Good Directories Do Not Accept All Submissions

If a directory accepted all sites that were submitted, it would soon begin to include many junk sites. As a result, it would cease to be a good source of worthwhile info. And Google might withdraw any PR it has been assigned.

So, at least for remaining in the good books of Google, most directories have some criteria for including sites in their index. This is particularly true of specialized directories restricted to niche themes.

Unless you meet the criteria for inclusion, your site could be rejected. This could happen even if you had paid money for a quicker review of your site.

So what are the typical criteria?

The first one is that your site must contain something of value to Web surfers. These surfers are mainly seeking information or entertainment. So directories look to see whether your site offers some value in these forms.

Secondly, directories prefer sites with "substantial" content. They prefer a site with 20 or more pages of valuable content to one with just one page, even if that page has value.

There could also be restrictions on the themes – no adult sites, no hate content, no copyright violations and so on.

Do take time to understand the criteria and ensure that your site meets these.

And Finally, Go for Manual Directory Submission

Another key issue is the mode of submission. As elaborated in another article on manual directory submission, directories have come to hate automated submissions that dump huge volumes of useless junk before their editors. Manual submission of your site by hand has a much higher chance of being reviewed and accepted.

Article Source: http://www.acmearticles.com

About Author:

Aboul kashem is webmastering webmarketreports.com, based in Bangladesh, that provide manual directory submission, article submission, link building services. They can provide high quality services at a very attractive prices as lobour and other overhead costs are lower than that of other many countries.