SEO Tips

Monitoring Website Traffic

It is not enough to just own a website but it's just as important to keep tabs on your site to see whether or not the traffic received is at a constant number, rising or falling. Many business owners go through the trouble of setting up websites but put absolutely no energy into monitoring them. It may be looked at as a tedious job because some people can't make sense of the statistics. It is much easier than people think and it can be improved today.

One way would be to monitor what your users like and don't like. This can be achieved by looking at the most visited pages and improving them to fit your users' needs. Knowing the pages your users exit the most also says a lot. For instance, if your daily traffic is high, then it falls when the users get to a specific page, this could mean that there is something that's not clear. Try going through the content on that particular page and changing it accordingly.

Another traffic monitoring style would be to check for any defects on your website. Faulty tools would discourage potential customers from visiting your webpage in the future. Consequently, look out for non-existent pages which mislead your users and have them replaced as soon as possible. It is also important in knowing which market strategies work and which ones don't. A very important statistic is a Page View/Visitors. This shows how many people come to your site and how long they stay there. If they don't stay too long it definitely can't be good news.

Regularly monitoring your website can safeguard you against hackers. An experienced hacker can use spam to add user information "phishing" sites on your domain, thus luring users to fill in forms which ask for personal details. If they do the information goes directly to the hacker who now has access to their account. Needless to say your website will be shut down and substantial amounts of money will be lost. Keep tabs on pages that come up that you didn't set up yourself. It is also advised that you should ask for some form of registration for users who would like to leave a comment on your blog. This ensures that the people who want to post a comment are serious about it.

Various analytical tools are available to help monitor your website. A few examples are Google Analytics, Awstats, Mint, Clicky and Site meter. Use them and the amount of traffic in your website will increase.

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Ameen Mujtabaa - Ameen Mujtabaa is an aspiring Internet marketer. Visit his blog System Review Bonus to see his latest comprehensive unbiased product reviews.

Tracking Your Website Statistics To Improve Your Site's Success

So you've got your new website up and running and you've done some advertising to get people to visit. How do you know whether they're actually coming or not?

Most web hosting plans include some sort of statistics package. This software will tell you all kinds of information about your visitors, not just how many you're getting.

All visitors coming to your website get logged by your web server. They automatically create log files with information like your visitors' origin (their IP address), what browser software they're using, the pages they looked at, how long they stayed on your site, whether they arrived by clicking a link from a search engine and if so, they keywords they used when running the search.

The trouble with these log files is they're practically impossible to make sense out of. They're really just long lists of numbers and words that are very cryptic and hard for the average person to decipher.

Statistics software will take these hard-to-understand logs and convert them into a format that is easy for the average person to understand. Most of them will create both reports and charts to show you what your visitors are doing on your site.

Statistics programs are included with most hosting plans. There are a few different ones available, so it will depend on your host, but they're usually accessed through the control panel for your website.

Three of the most popular stats packages are Analog, AWStats and Webalizer. Part of the reason they're so popular is because they are all free.

What Do You Really Need to Know?

These stats programs give you all kinds of interesting information about your website traffic, but not all of it is really that important.

For example, they will all show you the number of hits your website has received. Hits are a little misleading though - they're not the number of people visiting your site.

Hits are actually requests for files, so every single file that gets requested logs 1 hit. If you home page has 6 images and 2 include files, your stats software will register 9 hits every time that page gets loaded (1 for the page itself, 6 for the images and 2 for the includes).

Some of the more important stats to look at include:

- Number of visits

- Page views (you can use this to see which pages are most popular)

- Popular entry and exit pages

- Referring sites

- Referring keywords, if referred from a search engine

By tracking these stats and tweaking things that are related to them you can improve your site's success with your visitors, whether that means more sales, staying on the site longer, more people signing up for your email newsletter, or anything else.

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John Lenaghan - John Lenaghan has been a full-time internet marketer for over 5 years. Over that time, he has tried virtually every business model and system that ...

What is a ping-back or track-back url – Streamlining Your Social Web Presence in 6 Steps

Following the advice of social media and Web 2.0 experts, you have established your own blog and joined a number of social sites, including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, LibraryThing, and Upcoming.org, among others. Now, the experts say you must add content to each of these accounts regularly to keep them dynamic. So, how's this supposed to make your life easier?

Relax. With some careful planning, you can streamline the process of keeping all of your Social Web accounts fresh and engaging without breaking your back or the bank. The trick is to make your social accounts work together. Most social sites use the concept of open source to make it easy for developers to write applications that enhance the features of the site. For our purposes, we will look at applications that can help us streamline our existing presence in the Social Web.

To demonstrate what I mean about streamlining the process, I'll start with an example. Imagine that you have the following social media tools and accounts already in place on the Social Web:

A WordPress Blog
A Facebook Profile
A Facebook Page
A MySpace Page
A YouTube Account
A Flickr Account
A Twitter Account
An Upcoming.org Account
A GoodReads Account

Your 6 Step Plan to a Streamlined Social Web Presence

Step 1. Optimize Your Blog Feed The very first step in streamlining your presence in the Social Web is burning your blog's feed to Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com). This is a free service, and obtaining a FeedBurner account will help you to easily manage and track your feed subscriptions. Once you have burned your feed to FeedBurner, note the URL of your new feed, which will look something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MyBlogName.

Step 2. Feed Your Blog Now, you want to make sure that you are getting the most mileage from your blog posts. To do so, feed your blog entries into all of your social accounts that offer blog feeding applications. Remember that each social site may provide its own different way of accomplishing this.

Facebook, for example, allows you to feed your blogs into the Notes section of your Facebook page. Click Edit in the Notes box of your Facebook page and find the option that allows you to import notes from an external blog.

Feeding blog entries into MySpace is a little different. Find and add the application RSS Reader. You can access many MySpace applications by clicking More/Apps Gallery from the main menu of your MySpace homepage.

It is possible to feed your blog posts into Twitter, but blog posts are typically too long for this purpose. If you read on, I will clue you in to a better solution for streamlining your micro-blog entries.

Step 3. Maximize the Use of Your Multimedia Maximize the exposure of your images and video clips by adding galleries and badges to your blog or Website, and by feeding your images and videos into your social networking profiles and pages.

WordPress has many plugins available for integrating Flickr images. My favorite right now is Flickr Tag (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/flickr-tag/), a plugin that allows you to easily place your Flickr images right into your blog posts, and create galleries.

A Flickr badge is a snippet of Flash or HTML code that you can place on the sidebar of your Website or blog that will pull in and highlight random or specific photos from your Flickr account. Find out more by going to: http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne.

Similarly, you can embed video galleries into your blog or Website by using your YouTube channels. After you've added videos to your YouTube channel, you can generate code for a video gallery and place this code on your Website or blog.

To feed images from Flickr into your Facebook page and MySpace profile, find the appropriate application and add it. For Facebook, I use an application called My Flickr (http://apps.facebook.com/myflickr/); for MySpace, use Happy Flickr.

You can place videos on your Facebook page by implementing an application called YouTube Box (http://apps.facebook.com/videobox/), and using the application YouTube Favorites, you can display video clips on your MySpace profile.

Step 4. Integrate Other Social Tools The way in which you proceed in step 4 depends entirely upon which social tools and Websites make up your Social Web presence. In the example I have created, we have accounts with Upcoming.org (a social event calendar) and GoodReads (a niche book sharing and author site) that have not yet been integrated. By searching the applications in Facebook and MySpace, you'll find that Facebook offers an application that allows you to integrate your Upcoming.org events, and both Facebook and MySpace include applications that allow you to display your GoodReads books and book reviews.

Step 5. Take Advantage of Streamlining Tools Using the social tool, Ping.fm, you can add short posts to your mini feeds on Facebook, MySpace, and your micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Jaiku. Ping.fm (http://ping.fm) is useful tool that lets you post one brief entry, or often a status update, and feed it into a number of social sites.

Step 6. Research and Repeat The very nature of the Social Web is connecting people through social platforms and applications; therefore, when deciding whether or not to invest time and resources into a new social tool, it's best to research the ways that tool will accommodate your existing Social Web presence. Can you feed in your blog posts? Does it allow you to import images from a photo sharing site or video clips from from your video sharing community? Have sites like Ping.fm integrated the new tool yet, or do your existing social sites offer applications to integrate the new tool?

When you do decide to integrate a new social tool or Website, do so as best you can by repeating the applicable steps presented above.

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Deltina Hay -
About the Author:

Deltina Hay is the principal of Social Media Power, and founder of the new social media consulting. Her new book, A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization, will be released in March 2009.

What is a ping-back or track-back url – 25 Free Tips for Marketing your Blog

With so many blogs being created every day, it's a mystery to many bloggers how to make their blog stand out. It's simple. People want to read good content, and with good content comes ad revenue. Well, maybe it's not that easy… We've finally unleashed the secrets of successful blog marketing. Do note that these are not guaranteed to increase your click-through ratios and they will not bring good karma to you or your ads.. If only.. Nonetheless, these tips should benefit your blog and make it more user-friendly, more easily accessible, and more content-enabled.
There are many types of blogs or purposes for blogs and a certain number of tactics are applicable to just about all of them, so here is a -short- list of tips for marketing and optimizing a blog:
1. Decide on a stand alone domain name www.myblog.com or directory of existing site www.mysite.com/blog. Sub domain is also an option blog.mysite.com. Avoid hosted services that do not allow you to use your own domain name!

2. Obtain and install customizable blog software - WordPress and Moveable Type are my favorites.

3. Customize blog look and feel templates - aka design.

4. Research keywords and develop a glossary - Keyword Discovery, WordTracker, SitePoint, SEOBook Keyword Research.

5. Optimize the blog: * Template optimization - RSS subscription options, social bookmark links, HTML code, Unique title tags, URLs, Sitemap * Add helper plugins specific to WordPress or MT * Create keyword rich categories (reference your keyword glossary)

6. Enable automatic trackback and ping functionality.

7. Create Feedburner Pro account and enable feed tracking.

8. Setup Google acount for Sitemap, validate and prep for future submission.

9. Identify authoritative blogs, web sites and hubs for outbound resource links and blogroll.

10. Format archived posts, related posts.

11. Enable statistics for tracking - Performancing, Google Analytics, ClickTracks.

12. Submit RSS feed and Blog URL to prominent RSS and Blog directories / search engines.

13. Engage in an ongoing link building campaign.

14. If podcast or video content are available, submit to Podcast and Vlog directories.

15. Submit blog url to paid directories with categories for blogs - Yahoo, BOTW, bCentral, WOW, JoeAnt.

16. Optimize and distribute a press release announcing blog.

17. Request feedback or reviews of your blog in relevant forums, discussion threads. If you have a resourceful post that will help others, point to it.

18. Research and comment on relevant industry related blogs and blogs with significant centers of influence.

19. Post regularly. If it's a news oriented blog, 3-5 times per day. If it's an authoritative blog, 3-5 times per week, but each post must be unique and high value.

20. Monitor inbound links, traffic, comments and mentions of your blog - Google Alerts, Technorati, Blogpulse, Yahoo News, Ask Blogs and Feeds.

21. Always respond to comments on your blog and when you detect a mention of your blog on another blog, thank that blogger in the comments of the post.

22. Make contact with related bloggers on AND offline if possible.

23. When making blog posts always cite the source with a link and don't be afraid to mention popular bloggers by name. Use keywords in the blog post title, in the body of the post and use anchor text when you link to previous posts you've made.

24. Use social networking services, forums and discussion threads to connect with other bloggers. If they like your stuff, they will link to you.

25. Remember when web sites were a new concept and the sage advice to print your web address everywhere you print your phone number? The same advice applies for your blog.

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Manuel Turcanu -
About the Author:

Manuel Turcanu

Internet marketing expert, Affiliate marketing expert,

Flash Intro Designer expert

Direct contact:elite.mt.pro@gmail.com

Income For Life:

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Affiliate Marketing Zone:

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