The Key to Better Websites

The Key to Better Websites
[A] Navigation


Introduction

Importance of the latter :

One of the primary implications of a well-organized / good website, is to keep your visitors in the website. A website is definitely created for a purpose, unless intended for personal use, which is the minority. For example, a portfolio website would want to be visited and it’s content viewed. For companies and internet businesses, your website certainly aims to provide product information, to make sales, or somewhat similar. However, most individuals undoubtly prefer visually captivating designs, so on and so forth. It is undeniable that this causes no harm, but one must put himself/herself in other people’s shoes, as to understand how a visitor to the website might think, do and react.

1 )  Navigation

As I said, a web designer has to learn how to think the way your visitors think.

Situation A : Website with good navigation ( 2-3 hyperlinks to target page ), well planned  in terms of placement, and design.

Situation B : Website with poor navigation ( takes forever for the visitor to reach his/her target page ), hard-to-read navigation fonts and poor placement of the navigation buttons/bar.

In Situation A, a visitor will always want to be able to access his/her target page. For example, the individual comes across your website, and is interested in the product sold, but wants to find more information. He/she finds the navigation with no trouble, and enters the particular product information page.

As for Situation B, a visitor stumbles into the website, and would also like to find out more information about the product. Unfortunately, due to bad placement and fanciful font-types, the visitor takes forever, or even fails to find the navigation bar. Even when he/she does so, links to the product information are nowhere to be found, (example : home > about > products > product image > etc…[a few more clicks] > product information ).

Analysis : In both situations, wouldn’t a website with characteristics similar to the Situation A be more rewarding ergo better?


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The Key to Better Websites

The Key to Better Websites
[ Part B ] Design


Introduction

Importance of the latter :

Design, design, design. To put the wonders of a good design into perspective, imagine a when we are purchasing a T-Shirt. First of all, what do we look at? The design of the T-Shirt, of course. Well most people do, other than the material factor. But let’s assume the all other factors are constant, wouldn’t the design or looks, become the key aspect then?

2 )  Design

Putting oneself in another individual’s shoes, as usual. Here are another two situations.

Situation A : A website with good design and breathtaking graphics. (Good color schemes with matching theme), pictures. (Optimum resolutions and relevant) and proper fonts and word sizes.

Situation B : A website inversely equipped with hideous graphics and pictures in terms of resolution, quality and relevancy. (Red pictures with a bright green background) Fonts used were not matching albeit too fanciful. (Too small, artsy font-types)

Situation A, visitors that enter the website are immediately awestruck by the design and artwork. The well placed pictures and designs will somewhat symbolizes the positive nature of the company/website. As we know, most people DO judge by impression.

As for Situation B, the shabby environment due to severe lack of creativity and badly taken pictures wouldn’t exactly help in attracting visitors. Fonts that were hard to be read, let alone comprehended, and mismatching themes in terms of color, isn’t exactly welcoming, is it?

Analysis: Now, the main idea here is to always plan your websites, try to get other individuals for feedback and perspectives. Each mindset might differ, but at least you will get room for improvement. Don’t get me wrong, even a plain website with proper design would generate plenty of positive implications, but the key idea here is to at least maintain an impressionable website.


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Search Engine Friendly Pages

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot's job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

What Is Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is a process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that this ranks your site highly in search engines so that when someone searches for specific phrases it returns your site on tops. It basically involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags and also involves appropriate link building process. The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves. Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine. New sites need not be "submitted" to search engines to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.

If you are unable to research and choose keywords and work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to work with you on these issues.

Search engine marketing and promotion companies, will look at the plan for your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. If you wish, they will also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make recommendations for editing and improvements to keep your site traffic flow and your search engine ranking high. Normally your search engine optimization experts work with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are considered at the same time.

The Importance of Search Engines

The Importance of Search Engines

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. When a topic is typed for search, nearly instantly, the search engine will sift through the millions of pages it has indexed about and present you with ones that match your topic. The searched matches are also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Remember that a prospective customer will probably only look at the first 2-3 listings in the search results. So it does matter where your website appears in the search engine ranking.

Further, they all use one of the top 6-7 search engines and these search engines attract more visitors to websites than anything else. So finally it all depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your site.

It is the Keywords that play an important role than any expensive online or offline advertising of your website.

It is found by surveys that a when customers want to find a website for information or to buy a product or service, they find their site in one of the following ways:

• The first option is they find their site through a search engine.
• Secondly they find their site by clicking on a link from another website or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.
• Occasionally, they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an article.

Thus it’s obvious the the most popular way to find a site, by search engine, represents more than 90% of online users. In other words, only 10% of the people looking for a website will use methods other than search engines.

All search engines employ a ranking algorithm and one of the main rules in a ranking algorithm is to check the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Don’t forget that algorithms also give weightage to link population (number of web pages linking to your site). When performed by a qualified, experienced search engine optimization consultant, your site for high search engine rankings really does work, unless you have a lot of money and can afford to pay the expert. With better knowledge of search engines and how they work, you can also do it on your own.

Submitting Your Website to Search Engines

Submitting Your Website to Search Engines

If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.

Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are but only false promises. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right key words, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content. Don’t submit websites that are incomplete. While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.

Mere submission to search engine companies does not guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite sometime before they take up your site for review by human editors. One important factor to remember while submitting site is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines like ‘http://www.google.com’ hardly considers submissions without sitemaps.

There are many online companies that accept search engine submission services. You can choose to do it yourself with a software package and service like this one:

http://www.webposition.com/order/trial.asp?WT.mc_id=google%3A%7Bifsearch%3Asearch%7D%7Bifcontent%3Acontent%7D%3A%7Bcreative%7D%3Atrial%3A%7Bkeyword%7D&WT.srch=1

Or if you want professional help try the following sites:

http://www.addpro.com/professional_submission

http://www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.html

Don’t use the automatic submission services.

Here is a list of the most popular Search Engines and directory companies:

Search Engines

Go.com/InfoSeek AltaVista

Google, HotBot

Excite/Webcrawler

 

Directories

AOL Search Inktomi

Lycos Open Directory

MSN, Yahoo!

LookSmart Snap

Apart from the above there are thousands of search engines and directory companies, where you can submit your website to as many companies as possible. The following links gives info on other search engines and directories:

http://websearch.about.com/library/searchengine/blsearchenginesatoz.htm

http://websearch.about.com/library/tableofcontents/blsearchenginetableofcontents.htm

The Importance of Referrer Logs

The Importance of Referrer Logs

Referrer logging is used to allow web servers and websites to identify where people are visiting them either for promotional or security purposes. You can find out which search engine they used to find your site and whether your customer has come from a ‘linked site’. It is basically the URL of the previous webpage from which your link was followed.

By default, most hosting accounts don’t include referrer logs but may be subscribedd for an extra monthly fee. If your web host does not provide a graphic report of your log files, you can still view the referrer logs for your website by logging into the host server using free or low-cost FTP software, like these:

FTP Explorer:   http://www.ftpx.com/

LogMeIn: http://secure.logmein.com/dmcq/103/support.asp

SmartFTP: http://www.smartftp.com/

FTP Voyager: http://www.ftpvoyager.com/

The log file is available on your web server which can be download into your computer later. You can use a log analysis tool, like those mentioned below, to create a graphic report from your log files so that the files are easier to understand.

Abacre Advanced Log Analyzer http://www.abacre.com/ala/

Referrer Soft http://www.softplatz.com/software/referrer/

Log Analyzer http://www.loganalyzer.net

You can view the files using Word, Word Perfect, txt or WordPad files even if you don’t have the right tool. This information is very crucial to your business and marketing plans and is not advisable to neglect it.

In addition to identifying the search engine or linked site from where your visitor arrived, referrer logs can also tell you what keywords or keyword phrases your client used for searching.

As referrer information can sometimes violate privacy, some browsers allow the user to disable the sending of referrer information. Proxy and Firewall software can also filter out referrer information, to avoid leaking the location of private websites. This can result in other problems, as some servers block parts of their site to browsers that don't send the right referrer information, in an attempt to prevent deep linking or unauthorized use of bandwidth. Some proxy software gives the top-level address of the target site itself as the referrer, which prevents these problems and still not divulging the user's last visited site.

Since the referrer can easily be spoofed or faked, however, it is of limited use in this regard except on a casual basis.

Keyword Density

Keyword Density

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

• Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.
• Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.
• Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.
• When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.
• Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

Must Have Features Your Web Site

Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles.

The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the  information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understanding Your Target Customer

If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does your website give enough contact information?

When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.

How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.   

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example:  Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

Writing a Traffic Pulling Article

As marketers, we are told that we should be article marketing.  It is how you make money as an affiliate, it is how you promote your websites and it is how you add content to your virtual real estate empire.

Many people find article writing difficult to do because they are not used to writing.  If you have the money, it can be outsourced.  However, for many people starting out online, money is tight and so they can't afford an outsourcer.

You can get articles written for a couple of dollars, but they are likely to be very poor quality.  For a decent 400 to 500 word article you are looking to pay around ten dollars, possibly more depending on the niche and the author.

You can write the articles yourself, and it's not that difficult to do if you follow a system.  Many people suffer from writers block or are just not used to writing an article.  It can be very daunting to sit down and write if it is something you are not used to.

Below is a system that works very well, it is one I use myself and you can be writing high quality articles surprisingly quickly with this technique.  It really isn't that hard and it enables even the most novice of writers to create decent articles rapidly.

Step 1 : Decide upon the niche you are writing in.

Step 2 : Determine which keyword(s) you are targeting in your article.

Step 3 : Determine the subject your article will be about.

Step 4 : Type into Google some of your keywords and see what problems and issues people are facing in that niche.  What do they want to know?  What is their pain?  What solutions are they looking for?

Step 5 : Write a powerful, interest building title with your keyword at the start, if possible.

Step 6 : Write out four or five short sentences about the problem (don't give away too much ... you want your reader to buy).

Step 7 : Turn each sentence into more descriptive paragraphs, remembering not to give away too much information.

Step 8 : Write a paragraph introducing the article at the top.

Step 9 : Write a paragraph summarizing what was in the article at the bottom.

And there you have a good quality, unique article that you could spin or just submit to an article directory or use on your website.  Content is king on the Internet, and unique content provides you with an edge over the competition.

This method will help you to quickly write articles, and it won't be long before you can write a high quality article in under ten minutes.  With practise, you will be able to do them in five to seven minutes easily!

And remember the more articles you have out there, the more you can potentially earn!

Writing a Traffic Pulling Article

As marketers, we are told that we should be article marketing.  It is how you make money as an affiliate, it is how you promote your websites and it is how you add content to your virtual real estate empire.

Many people find article writing difficult to do because they are not used to writing.  If you have the money, it can be outsourced.  However, for many people starting out online, money is tight and so they can't afford an outsourcer.

You can get articles written for a couple of dollars, but they are likely to be very poor quality.  For a decent 400 to 500 word article you are looking to pay around ten dollars, possibly more depending on the niche and the author.

You can write the articles yourself, and it's not that difficult to do if you follow a system.  Many people suffer from writers block or are just not used to writing an article.  It can be very daunting to sit down and write if it is something you are not used to.

Below is a system that works very well, it is one I use myself and you can be writing high quality articles surprisingly quickly with this technique.  It really isn't that hard and it enables even the most novice of writers to create decent articles rapidly.

Step 1 : Decide upon the niche you are writing in.

Step 2 : Determine which keyword(s) you are targeting in your article.

Step 3 : Determine the subject your article will be about.

Step 4 : Type into Google some of your keywords and see what problems and issues people are facing in that niche.  What do they want to know?  What is their pain?  What solutions are they looking for?

Step 5 : Write a powerful, interest building title with your keyword at the start, if possible.

Step 6 : Write out four or five short sentences about the problem (don't give away too much ... you want your reader to buy).

Step 7 : Turn each sentence into more descriptive paragraphs, remembering not to give away too much information.

Step 8 : Write a paragraph introducing the article at the top.

Step 9 : Write a paragraph summarizing what was in the article at the bottom.

And there you have a good quality, unique article that you could spin or just submit to an article directory or use on your website.  Content is king on the Internet, and unique content provides you with an edge over the competition.

This method will help you to quickly write articles, and it won't be long before you can write a high quality article in under ten minutes.  With practise, you will be able to do them in five to seven minutes easily!

And remember the more articles you have out there, the more you can potentially earn!

Why On Page SEO is Vital for Traffic

Many marketers get so caught up in the stampede for traffic that they spend all their time building links.  They forget that one of the most vital parts of SEO are the on page factors.

These are not complex for you to do and are something that should be fundamental when you create a new site.  Wordpress is an ideal platform as it typically lends itself well to search engine optimization.

The first step is for you to ensure you have set your title tag correctly.  This needs to be 64 characters in length.  Any longer and it will be cut off and this will look very odd in the search engine results.

The title tag needs to tell people what your site is about in such a way to entice them in to your web site.  It needs to include a keyword that is specific for the page the title tag is on.  Every page on your website should have its own unique title tag.  You should never use the same title tag on every page.

Next are your meta keywords and meta description.  These tell the search engine spiders what your site is about.  They are not massively important to the search engines, as most of them will analyse your site to see what it is really about.

These are important if you are using Adsense as without these meta tags in place, you find your Adsense ads are not focused on your niche.

The meta description is important because it appears in the search engine results.  It is 150 characters for you to get people to click on your link and come to your website.  You need to be concise and enticing in the same sentence.

Your meta keywords and description should also be unique for each page within your site.

Any images on your site have what is known as ALT tags.  These are tags which provide an alternative description for the visually impaired. These are noticed by the search engines and can get your images ranking well.  Make sure you do not attach the same keyword to too many ALT tags and add the word graphic, picture, image or something similar afterwards.  This will again help tell the search engines your website is relevant for those keywords.

On top of this you can include your keyword in the header 1 (h1) tag on your page, i.e. the title in the text.  This is another indicator to the search engines that your site is important for that keyword.

Using your keyword well within the text of your page and including related keywords around it will also help your site rank.

You must make sure you do not spam or keyword stuff any of your pages because it is a surefire way to get yourself dropped from the search engine results.

By performing some simple on page SEO optimization you can gain the advantage in the search engines.  Remember that not all marketers do this, and this can put you ahead of your competition, which is vital for your profitable success.

Why On Page SEO is Vital for Traffic

Many marketers get so caught up in the stampede for traffic that they spend all their time building links.  They forget that one of the most vital parts of SEO are the on page factors.

These are not complex for you to do and are something that should be fundamental when you create a new site.  Wordpress is an ideal platform as it typically lends itself well to search engine optimization.

The first step is for you to ensure you have set your title tag correctly.  This needs to be 64 characters in length.  Any longer and it will be cut off and this will look very odd in the search engine results.

The title tag needs to tell people what your site is about in such a way to entice them in to your web site.  It needs to include a keyword that is specific for the page the title tag is on.  Every page on your website should have its own unique title tag.  You should never use the same title tag on every page.

Next are your meta keywords and meta description.  These tell the search engine spiders what your site is about.  They are not massively important to the search engines, as most of them will analyse your site to see what it is really about.

These are important if you are using Adsense as without these meta tags in place, you find your Adsense ads are not focused on your niche.

The meta description is important because it appears in the search engine results.  It is 150 characters for you to get people to click on your link and come to your website.  You need to be concise and enticing in the same sentence.

Your meta keywords and description should also be unique for each page within your site.

Any images on your site have what is known as ALT tags.  These are tags which provide an alternative description for the visually impaired. These are noticed by the search engines and can get your images ranking well.  Make sure you do not attach the same keyword to too many ALT tags and add the word graphic, picture, image or something similar afterwards.  This will again help tell the search engines your website is relevant for those keywords.

On top of this you can include your keyword in the header 1 (h1) tag on your page, i.e. the title in the text.  This is another indicator to the search engines that your site is important for that keyword.

Using your keyword well within the text of your page and including related keywords around it will also help your site rank.

You must make sure you do not spam or keyword stuff any of your pages because it is a surefire way to get yourself dropped from the search engine results.

By performing some simple on page SEO optimization you can gain the advantage in the search engines.  Remember that not all marketers do this, and this can put you ahead of your competition, which is vital for your profitable success.

Tracking Your Traffic

We all love traffic coming to our website.  The more the merrier in most cases.

However, as a marketer, that isn't the case.  Marketers want targeted traffic and they want to know where it is coming from.  Not knowing where your traffic is coming from means you don't know which traffic generation methods are working.

The majority of marketers make no effort to track their traffic and are grateful for any visitors to their website.

If you are paying for advertising and not tracking your traffic you are throwing money away!  You have to know which adverts are working and which are not.  This way you can do more advertising that is earning you money and less of that which isn't.

Tracking your traffic doesn't need to be complex and can be done very easily.  You can invest in scripts and services that will track your website traffic for you.  These vary from the cheap to the expensive, the good and to the brilliant.

You don't need to have a script or service to track your traffic, but it can often make it much easier for you.

A simple traffic tracking method is to use Google Analytics.  This is a free to sign up service that many marketers are using.  The good thing about it is that it offers in depth stats and can track almost anything.  The downside of it that it offers in depth stats and can track almost anything!

The complexity of it is a good and a bad thing because you can find out so much about your website that it will initially confuse you.  However, once you have spent some time analysing the results it will prove very useful.

Firstly you have to add the code to your website.  This code is unique for each of your websites and needs to be inserted at the bottom of each page in your website just before the closing body tag.

Once it is reporting data, you need to drive a decent amount of visitors to your site to get some good results.

Analytics will report on all activity on your website and even go as far to overlay where people are clicking to help you understand the activity on your website.  You can link your analytics account with your Adsense and Adwords accounts to further help you understand how well they are working for you.

One of the biggest benefits of Analytics is that it can provide goal tracking to track sales and sign ups to lists.  It can be a bit tricky to get working behind scripts and membership sites, but is worth using.

The big appeal to most marketers is the fact that it has a lot of features, more than many scripts and is completely free.  Of course, Google get to understand exactly what happens on your website, but that is a small trade off for such in depth analytics.

Using Google Analytics will give you a good understanding of where your traffic is coming from and what it is doing on your site.  Through this you can improve your conversion rate, and in turn, your profits.

Tracking Your Traffic

We all love traffic coming to our website.  The more the merrier in most cases.

However, as a marketer, that isn't the case.  Marketers want targeted traffic and they want to know where it is coming from.  Not knowing where your traffic is coming from means you don't know which traffic generation methods are working.

The majority of marketers make no effort to track their traffic and are grateful for any visitors to their website.

If you are paying for advertising and not tracking your traffic you are throwing money away!  You have to know which adverts are working and which are not.  This way you can do more advertising that is earning you money and less of that which isn't.

Tracking your traffic doesn't need to be complex and can be done very easily.  You can invest in scripts and services that will track your website traffic for you.  These vary from the cheap to the expensive, the good and to the brilliant.

You don't need to have a script or service to track your traffic, but it can often make it much easier for you.

A simple traffic tracking method is to use Google Analytics.  This is a free to sign up service that many marketers are using.  The good thing about it is that it offers in depth stats and can track almost anything.  The downside of it that it offers in depth stats and can track almost anything!

The complexity of it is a good and a bad thing because you can find out so much about your website that it will initially confuse you.  However, once you have spent some time analysing the results it will prove very useful.

Firstly you have to add the code to your website.  This code is unique for each of your websites and needs to be inserted at the bottom of each page in your website just before the closing body tag.

Once it is reporting data, you need to drive a decent amount of visitors to your site to get some good results.

Analytics will report on all activity on your website and even go as far to overlay where people are clicking to help you understand the activity on your website.  You can link your analytics account with your Adsense and Adwords accounts to further help you understand how well they are working for you.

One of the biggest benefits of Analytics is that it can provide goal tracking to track sales and sign ups to lists.  It can be a bit tricky to get working behind scripts and membership sites, but is worth using.

The big appeal to most marketers is the fact that it has a lot of features, more than many scripts and is completely free.  Of course, Google get to understand exactly what happens on your website, but that is a small trade off for such in depth analytics.

Using Google Analytics will give you a good understanding of where your traffic is coming from and what it is doing on your site.  Through this you can improve your conversion rate, and in turn, your profits.

Socail Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is one of the best ways to get your websites ranking well and for getting direct traffic.  The search engines know that the social bookmarking sites are a direct indicator of what people are actual interested in.  Sure, they know marketers use it, but they realise that the majority of content that is social bookmarked multiple times is real content that people are finding useful and interesting.

You can take advantage of this and use social bookmarking to get your sites ranking well for their keywords.

Firstly, you need to open an account on some social bookmarking sites.  Rather than social bookmark each site manually, look at software such as OnlyWire which semi-automates the process.  This will make your life a lot easier.

Once you have your account set up, find some Internet marketing colleagues, friends or family who would be willing to set up an account themselves with Onlywire.

Then you simply trade bookmarks.  They bookmark your sites, you bookmark theirs.

Most marketers only have their sites bookmarked once, and very occasionally more than once.  The search engines are probably very aware of this and so pay more attention to sites that have multiple bookmarks on a single site.

This simple technique can easily get you multiple bookmarks and will give your sites a much needed boost in the search engines.

Alternatively, you can outsource the bookmarking and hire people to do it for you.  This will very quickly add up if you are creating a lot of sites.  You can find people on forums such as Digitalpoint who will do it very cheaply for you, but it is still going to add up.

You can apply the same technique to sites such as Stumbleupon and Digg, both of which can potentially get you massive amounts of traffic.  These sites expect more newsworthy and interesting articles.  With a well written article you can expect thousands of visitors in a day, quite literally.

Setting up multiple social bookmarking accounts yourself and bookmarking your sites is possible.  However, these sites are smart and will realise what you are doing unless you hide behind proxies.  This can be done, but often the hassle isn't worth it, particularly when it is easy to network with other marketers.

Networking with other marketers and trading bookmarks also has a side effect of building your network of contacts.  These could potentially turn into joint venture partners, product partners or more in the future.

Social bookmarking is an excellent way for you to get traffic both from the search engines and from the social bookmarking sites.  Do it well and you can benefit from great search engine rankings and massive traffic.

Socail Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is one of the best ways to get your websites ranking well and for getting direct traffic.  The search engines know that the social bookmarking sites are a direct indicator of what people are actual interested in.  Sure, they know marketers use it, but they realise that the majority of content that is social bookmarked multiple times is real content that people are finding useful and interesting.

You can take advantage of this and use social bookmarking to get your sites ranking well for their keywords.

Firstly, you need to open an account on some social bookmarking sites.  Rather than social bookmark each site manually, look at software such as OnlyWire which semi-automates the process.  This will make your life a lot easier.

Once you have your account set up, find some Internet marketing colleagues, friends or family who would be willing to set up an account themselves with Onlywire.

Then you simply trade bookmarks.  They bookmark your sites, you bookmark theirs.

Most marketers only have their sites bookmarked once, and very occasionally more than once.  The search engines are probably very aware of this and so pay more attention to sites that have multiple bookmarks on a single site.

This simple technique can easily get you multiple bookmarks and will give your sites a much needed boost in the search engines.

Alternatively, you can outsource the bookmarking and hire people to do it for you.  This will very quickly add up if you are creating a lot of sites.  You can find people on forums such as Digitalpoint who will do it very cheaply for you, but it is still going to add up.

You can apply the same technique to sites such as Stumbleupon and Digg, both of which can potentially get you massive amounts of traffic.  These sites expect more newsworthy and interesting articles.  With a well written article you can expect thousands of visitors in a day, quite literally.

Setting up multiple social bookmarking accounts yourself and bookmarking your sites is possible.  However, these sites are smart and will realise what you are doing unless you hide behind proxies.  This can be done, but often the hassle isn't worth it, particularly when it is easy to network with other marketers.

Networking with other marketers and trading bookmarks also has a side effect of building your network of contacts.  These could potentially turn into joint venture partners, product partners or more in the future.

Social bookmarking is an excellent way for you to get traffic both from the search engines and from the social bookmarking sites.  Do it well and you can benefit from great search engine rankings and massive traffic.

RSS Feeds Bring Massive Backlinks

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a method of taking content and syndicating it out to multiple sites.  It was primarily aimed at newsfeeds and providing content from news sites to other sites.

Like many other technologies, it has been hi-jacked by Internet Marketers who have found this is an excellent way to get backlinks.  It allows you to syndicate your content to hundreds of other websites at a click of a button, which in turn will boost your site in the search engine rankings.

In order to use RSS syndication, you have to have an RSS feed from your website.  The easiest way to do this is to use Wordpress when creating your website.  There are ways of making RSS feeds from normal HTML websites, but it is not always as simple as you may think.  Quite often it involves a manual process and manual submission of files.  However, there are a few websites that will automatically convert HTML to RSS for you.

Once you have an RSS feed you need to find some places to submit it.

There are two types of site you want to find.

Firstly you are looking for RSS directories.  A quick Google will bring up plenty of directories you can use.  There is software available you can buy which will automate the submission for you.

Once you have found your directories you want to submit your RSS feeds to them.  Manually it isn't the fastest process, but it can be outsourced.  You need to have your keywords, a title and sometimes a description prepared, but that won't take long.

It is often worth using different descriptions, titles and keywords to ensure each submission is unique.  What level of difference this actually makes no one is quite sure, but it does appear to help.

If you are manually submitting RSS feeds then you must keep track of which sites you have submitted where.  The reason being you don't want to submit the same site more than once.  Plus, you are likely to want to submit other sites in the future.

The second type of site is the RSS Aggregator. This is a site which takes a number of RSS feeds and combines them into a single feed or webpage.  This single feed can be submitted to RSS directories, further increasing your backlinks.

The RSS aggregator can be useful to mix up your RSS feeds on a topic with feeds from news sites on the same topic.  This will provide a higher level of authority and provide more bulk to the content.

When using RSS feeds, you need to also remember that many Web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo and many article directories have RSS feeds for the pages you create.  These can also be submitted to RSS directories and aggregators in order to further increase links and boost rankings.

Your RSS feed submissions will be updated every time you update your webpage.  Therefore, if you are regularly adding new content, you can find it syndicated out to many websites very quickly, gaining you backlinks to your site.

RSS feeds are a great way to get additional backlinks and to help your sites rank well for their keywords.  Use them, enjoy them and see the links flooding in.

RSS Feeds Bring Massive Backlinks

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a method of taking content and syndicating it out to multiple sites.  It was primarily aimed at newsfeeds and providing content from news sites to other sites.

Like many other technologies, it has been hi-jacked by Internet Marketers who have found this is an excellent way to get backlinks.  It allows you to syndicate your content to hundreds of other websites at a click of a button, which in turn will boost your site in the search engine rankings.

In order to use RSS syndication, you have to have an RSS feed from your website.  The easiest way to do this is to use Wordpress when creating your website.  There are ways of making RSS feeds from normal HTML websites, but it is not always as simple as you may think.  Quite often it involves a manual process and manual submission of files.  However, there are a few websites that will automatically convert HTML to RSS for you.

Once you have an RSS feed you need to find some places to submit it.

There are two types of site you want to find.

Firstly you are looking for RSS directories.  A quick Google will bring up plenty of directories you can use.  There is software available you can buy which will automate the submission for you.

Once you have found your directories you want to submit your RSS feeds to them.  Manually it isn't the fastest process, but it can be outsourced.  You need to have your keywords, a title and sometimes a description prepared, but that won't take long.

It is often worth using different descriptions, titles and keywords to ensure each submission is unique.  What level of difference this actually makes no one is quite sure, but it does appear to help.

If you are manually submitting RSS feeds then you must keep track of which sites you have submitted where.  The reason being you don't want to submit the same site more than once.  Plus, you are likely to want to submit other sites in the future.

The second type of site is the RSS Aggregator. This is a site which takes a number of RSS feeds and combines them into a single feed or webpage.  This single feed can be submitted to RSS directories, further increasing your backlinks.

The RSS aggregator can be useful to mix up your RSS feeds on a topic with feeds from news sites on the same topic.  This will provide a higher level of authority and provide more bulk to the content.

When using RSS feeds, you need to also remember that many Web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo and many article directories have RSS feeds for the pages you create.  These can also be submitted to RSS directories and aggregators in order to further increase links and boost rankings.

Your RSS feed submissions will be updated every time you update your webpage.  Therefore, if you are regularly adding new content, you can find it syndicated out to many websites very quickly, gaining you backlinks to your site.

RSS feeds are a great way to get additional backlinks and to help your sites rank well for their keywords.  Use them, enjoy them and see the links flooding in.