seoance

1. Unique Visitors - We all want to know if people are finding our website and if so, how many. This number can be tricky to determine. In the old days, people installed ‘hit counters” which gave the owner some obscure number regarding the number of times a person opened their website. The problem with hit counters is that they do not accurately count the true number of people who visit the site. Why is this? Hit counters are typically not sophisticated enough to separate a visitor from the data that comes up on your site - therefore, counters will show more hits than there truly are. This sounds complicated but this is how it works. For instance, if you gave a gallery page on your site and it shows twenty thumbnail pictures, each picture that loads is counted as a hit. Text on the page, other images, external stylesheets, external javascripts, links and other elements that require the server to pull a file to build the page register will count as a hit. One visitor may end up appearing as up to 100 hits.

I have seen many people base their unique visitor count primarily on the free hits counter that their hosting company provided or free software they downloaded, which leads them to believe they were receiving great traffic. After looking at their Google Analytics unique visitor count, the number was quite different and extremely low in most situations, which was highly disappointing to the new website owner.

A web analyst not only looks at the true number of visitors that visit your website but they also look at how many of those are Return Visitors in contrast to how many are Unique Visitors. Both are important numbers. Return Visitors can indicate a strong interest in your site and a likeliness of an action being made by that visitor such as a purchase. Unique visitors are valuable as well as it shows how many new people you are attracting.

2. Page Views - This term describes how many different pages a visitor looked at while on your website. The question an analyst is asking is, did this person just look at your front page and leave or did they browse around, click on your links, or read about your product or service. For marketing purposes, it is important to make sure potential clients are spending time on your website and finding everything they need. If they are not and leaving right after finding your website or what is called ‘bouncing’ out, you will want to analyze the reasons why. Did the person not find that they were searching for, was your website too obscure and difficult to maneuver, or are you even targeting the right audience? All of these are questions to be asked if your Page View statistics remain low.

3. Referrers - Discovering how people found you is also valuable. Did your visitor come from a website that linked to your website or did they find you through a search engine? Which search engine did they use? Which websites are linking to you that is providing you with traffic? Did your visitors find you through social media such as Twitter, Facebook or a blog? These answers can show how well your website represented in the web world and on a global basis?

4. Search Terms - Once an analyst determines how people are finding your website and you discover it may primarily be through search engines, the next logical question is, what words or phrases did that person type into the search engine. A search term or search string can show you if the terms people are using are correct for what your website represents - for example, if you have a large number of unique visitors, a small number of page views and people bouncing off the minute they find your site, you may wonder why? If you are a company for instance that sells model airplanes and your unique visitors are typing in the word ‘model’ in search of models or even ‘airplanes’, not using the two words together, they connotation is completely different and you may not be finding your correct audience.

5. Entry and Exit Pages - Another piece of information a web analyst studies is which pages on your website are visitors entering through and exiting? Did you pull your guest in, guide them through everything you wanted them to see or did you lose them right away or consistently on a particular page? Understanding which pages your visitors are looking at can help you identify the high interest pages to the low interest pages of your website.

While these are just a handful of terms used by a website analyst, it may help the new and even seasoned website owner understand how to improve their online rankings.

Pamela Ravenwood is a copywriter for ArteWorks SEO. She is an award winning writer, journalist, SEO specialist and strategic planning consultant. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.

If you are new to the business of owning and operating a website then the understanding of analytics and search engine optimization may at first seem overwhelming. But like anything, it first requires a grasp of the terminology. Knowing the terminology, you will have a better understanding of what types of website goals you are shooting for.

Maybe you are now saying, my goal is just to sell more products or services. True enough. But to sell more products or services, one must understand who their customer is along with whether you are reaching that customer and if you are holding that customer’s attention long enough to make a sell. To do this, one must understand the interaction between customers and your website and this is done through Website Analytics.

Website analytics requires analyzing data on the back end of your website. A marketing specialist or search engine optimizer is going to look at these figures to help create and modify a marketing plan for you. So what types of things is this specialist looking at?

Part of Web Analytics is computation, investigation, and the compilation of data for the enhancement of a web site. With Analytics, there are two categories - Onsite and Offsite Web Analytics.
• Onsite Web Analytics: Refers to the measurement of the end user’s tour of the website. This method of analysis computes the performance of the website based on a profitable framework. Data collected when the user is on the site is tracked and charted. After many users are on the site, trends appear – and changes can be made to the site to funnel the stream of users in a direction.

• Offsite Web Analytics: Can be used to measure how a site’s competition is doing, the number of links directing users to the site. Offsite Web Analytics also plays a large role in advertising. How much a website should spend on advertising can vary depending on how much traffic the advertising is bringing in.

For many years Web Analytics was primarily considered the study and engineering of Onsite statistics. These days there are SEO professionals who produce tools which cover both the groupings.
Web Analytics Approaches

Tribulation through cookies: Until recently, SEO professionals have used several forms of cookie tracking. This presents a privacy issue. Many users are becoming more informed about their privacy on the web, and do not want 3rd party sites tracking their cookies. Understandably, many users do not want someone knowing all of the sites that they visit, so they choose to block the 3rd party cookie trackers. Web sites that want to stay ahead of this problem can opt to not use a 3rd party cookie tracker that shares it’s information across many websites. Another problem is when users delete their cookies. Thus rendering cross-site cookie tracking less credible. As more user block cross-site cookie tracking, it is becoming less-useful of a tool.

Exclusive landing pages
Having unique landing pages is an accurate way to track the activity for two categories. When used in advertising; two unique landing pages for two separate ads can show which ad performs better than the other. Another excellent use for unique landing pages is to have half of your user base split between two homepages. Changes can be made to one to see if those changes increase traffic, sales, or sign-ups.

Secure diagnostic metering
The two Web Analytic approaches mentioned above are imprecise and insecure methods with the vital issues of being susceptible to exploitation. These issues are dealt with time and again on paper, but have never been employed and as such, they are retained because of the engineering communities’ deficiency of interest or possibly due to the profits from the present circumstances to the website owners. The alternative is for web developers to stop focusing on what other sites users travel to, and increasing the efforts to streamline their own site. SEO Suites that give this information without tracking the user across many sites will become more powerful as users become more privacy conscious. Unique landing pages create the problem of being time consuming and ineffective over time. While an excellent sales pitch – SEO engineers know that it is snake oil.

Lytico makes complex SEO features easy for everyone to understand. Increase website traffic with Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reporting, Motion Charts, and more. For more information please visit us at: SEO Software, Search Engine Promotion

Article Source: Web Analytics- Gist And Its Approaches

The Internet has opened a world of opportunities for your business. But the whole purpose of creating your website would stand defeated if your prospective customer does not view it. Content and layout of a website are less significant in comparison with purpose of its creation, i.e.: reaching out to the people it is meant for. Of the millions of sites that compete with you online, to present your website to your customer is a task by itself. Coming to your rescue in this regard are Search Engines and Directory Submissions.

Search Engines with all the popularity surrounding them are definitely useful, but Directory Submissions too have carved a niche for marketing on the net.

Web directories in simple words refer to a group of web pages that are manually categorized and arranged under relevant topics and sub-topics facilitating smooth browsing by the user towards his desired link. The keyword here is manual. Unlike a search engine that is automated to pick up links and display the programmed output, a web directory has the human touch. Any request to add a website to a directory is considered after looking into the quality of the site, appropriate title description and content for the category and sub-topic chosen. Hence the chances of mismatch between the user “need” and user “find” are minimized.

Procedural Simplicity is one the many positive factors associated with directory submission. By merely keying in basic information like URL, Title, Description and Key Phrases describing your site, your webpage can find its way to most directories. While directory submissions can be either free or paid, most sites offer both categories of free and paid directory listing. Another key advantage is that most directory submissions actually find their way to search engines. Tie-up between search engines and directory submissions combines the best of both worlds for your web page. On the flip side is the time factor. A directory listing being a manual affair consumes time and effort. A free directory listing on any popular site may take anywhere between a few weeks to several months.

Customer/User benefit includes less complication as a quality database is smaller and crisper; a great deal of insignificant results carefully edited by the database manager. Time saved by the customer in finding his desired link would lead to future visits to the directory.

Being listed on any efficiently managed web directory, your website could attract a great deal of potential traffic resulting in improved website ranking, building and strengthening the vital links of your business.

There are also directory submission companies like http://www.DirectoryMaximizer.com that help you in submitting your website to all the relevant directories on the web.

Sameer S Panjwani manages and runs the online directory submission service, Directory Maximizer, which helps webmaster build one-way links to their sites.

Technorati Tags: directory submission, web directory, link popularity, linking strategy

Inbound links, usually referred to as IBLs or backlinks are essential if a Website is to become popular and rise to the top of the SERPS (Search engine results pages), and over time, a site with plenty of quality content will naturally get linked to by related sites. This is all well and good, but if you are in a hurry to build Web traffic (and who isn’t?) it is useful to know that there are some things we can do to speed things along.

Before embarking on your link building strategy be aware that some of these methods are open to abuse which could have a negative effect or even get your site banned, so please excercise some common sense and only submit your site’s link when it is relevant and reasonable to do so.

So without further ado, here are my 10 tips for obtaining search engine friendly outside links:

1 - Find online forums related to your site and become part of the community (along with a suitable signature that links to your site).

2 - Add comments to blogs with a link to related content on your Website.

3 - Submit on-topic articles to article directories and include your link in the author bio.

4 - Submit your link to the many free online directory sites.

5 - Add your comments to a guestbook and include your url.

6 - Email the webmaster of a related site and ask to trade links.

7 - Offer to provide some content for another site in return for a link back.

8 - If you have an eBay account, create an “about me” page and include a link to your Website.

9 - Program a useful tool or script that Webmasters will happily add to their sites.

10 - Create compelling and perhaps even controversial content on your Website that people will want to link to.

Of all of the above tips, numbers 7 and 10 are by far the best for an ethical and long term link building strategy, but don’t ruile out the others for some quick link building. Overall; with time and experimentation you will find that by building a quality site with interesting content the links to your site will develop all by themselves!

Getting visitors to a Website can take both time and effort, so it is worthwhile remembering that time spent link building is time well spent for your site and your business. Good luck!

Tony Williams is the author of Web Traffic in Black & White, the guide that unlocks the secrets of Web traffic. Check it out at http://webtraffic.tdlwebs.com

Technorati Tags: backlinks, link building, link strategy, website content, programs

Before you start trying to optimize your website, you should need to do a bit of research. This may sounds odd to a lot of web publishers, but before you do anything you need to do some keyword research. There are many different resources that you can go to and all you have to do is type in a subject and you can be given a list of the most commonly searched phrases relating to this topic. Why is this important? The reason is because that when you are optimizing your website you are not just optimizing for the search engine spiders, you are also optimizing for the web surfer that uses the search engines. For instance, if you have a website that is about golf you may find that the typical web surfer does not just type in golf but types in golf club or golf and then the city or state that they are interested in golfing in.

The phrasing is important because you can target your audience by incorporating the most common phrases. You would not want to simply use the keyword “golf” because there are millions of other websites that are also using the term golf and your website will literally get lost in the crowd. Instead, you will want to choose more of the specific keywords that your visitors will be likely to type into the search engine. When you have done this research, you will know which keywords that you should try to focus on and associate with your website.

Keyword research will not take you a lot of time; in fact it can take just minutes to perform. It may take you a bit longer to actually integrate these keywords in healthy amounts into your website. You do not just want to write up a bunch of fluff that will use the keywords as this is not how you can improve your pagerank and be seen. You want to improve your pagerank and then provide consumers with the service, product, or information that they are looking for when they visit your website.

Now you can probably see why many web publishers have a hard time actually optimizing their website! Optimization is something that happens slowly over time. Those that try to rush the process usually end up doing more damage than good, simply creating more work than was necessary. Keyword research is a significant task in order to optimize any site.

KC TAN is a SEO consultant with several years of related experiences. He recommends Files Host for uploading and fast file sharing and WeBlogPost for Free Blog Hosting. KC also visits EasyTurnKeySites for Turnkey websites, prebuilt websites.

Technorati Tags: keyword research, seo, internet marketing

When it comes to your Meta tags you want them to contain key information about your website as well as your top keywords. Make sure they keywords are in the title as well as in the body of the text. Make sure you write a description about your page using specific information and keywords, but keep it short and sweet. All your keywords should always be relevant to the content within the page they describe. With the title tag, each search engine looks at it and uses it primarily the same way, to summarize and compile the websites contents for its search engine users. The how and where your keywords are in your title tag are the most important element with to which you can get benefit from using title tag. Choosing keywords is an essential part of producing a successful website.

When creating the title for the website makes sure you include keywords in the title that are on the page. There has been a lot of talk about title tags about how they are not important anymore, but in reality they are still important. On your page to properly place your title tag you should put it between the HEAD tags, one of the best place to include it is right after the HEAD tag. Most of the SE use the meta title as the title of the page. When you do a search on search engines the title that is listed is the title on the website and sometime the Meta title is used. Once you understand why the title is so important, you can easily write more effective title tags. The title is so important because the first thing that a human searcher sees is the title. The Meta title is a critical factor in controlling where your site is listed in search engines.

In many results the Meta description will appear on the results page right under the title. The only caveat to remember is that your META description will only show if the search term is in the META description. Try to keep the title brief so it is not cut off in the results, it is best practice if you keep the description under 200 characters.. Your description contains your important key phrase and key words. Place your description in the opening paragraph, if you do this the description is weighted heavier by search engines. Sometimes even google picks up description tag. Make sure that title and description is crafted neatly and attracts both visitors and search engines.

Bots have been spidering the web since the ’90’s, including pages into various collections. Pictures are worth 1000 words to you and me, but zero to a search engine. Even if you ensure you have completely relevant Meta Tags, some search engines will still ignore them. Always make sure that your meta tags do not have any line breaks. The more educated you are about what search engines are looking for, the better you will be able to respond and rise in the rankings.

If you only put the description in the Meta tag section, then the search engine robots will see it but many of your visitors will not. Don’t hide this information in a place where your readers cannot see it. Meta tags are HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Using Meta tags is not some magic answer that everyone thinks it is. Meta Tags are most commonly used to distinguish the keywords that are relevant to a page’s content. The robots do scan the Meta tags and some of the search engines will use the information from them. Meta tags are still important today, they might not be as important but you still need to use them if you want to compete with other sites.

David Marc Fishman is the owner of free link directory site. The website that helps people who use paid link directory for one way links.

Technorati Tags: meta tags, meta description, title tag, search engines, SE rankings

Times are changing, the question is are you changing too? SEO has always been something which has divided people’s opinion but one thing is clear, time never stands still, what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Many people who are classed as experts give their opinion as to what is the best course of action to take and then wham everybody gives it a try. The result is quite clearly there for all to see, the idea was a good one but soon becomes over used and in a short while is worthless. The search engines get wind of what is going on, they change their ranking criteria and that seo technique has now died. The problem is that many webmasters continue to use the idea unaware that the times have changed. Come on guys changes are going on as we speak, take note and go with the flow.

For many a year all people were being advised was that you should be trying to obtain thousands of links pointing to your site. Backward links had been essential in reaching the top five of the search engine results in the early years of the internet but then the secret was let out of the bag. Automated linking software made the task of gaining backward links simple and for a short time certain webmasters made a lot of money, but boy did they cry when their sites were banned. There was outrage on the forums with people slamming search engines such as Google.

The future at least for a short while will be all about deep linking. That is where you have links not only pointing to the homepage of your website but also to its other pages. Lets face it, it is not exactly natural to have all of your links just pointing to one page is it?

Vary the link text to around six different key phrases. Also use a number of ways of obtaining these links, do not just concentrate on writing articles, perhaps add more quality content to your site. One quick thing to mention is that any content on your site should be original and unique content. Duplicate content could well be hit hard in the future, therefore I would just stick to original text if I were you.

Stephen Hill helps to promote a number of websites including:

stuttering treatment

stuttering therapy

stuttering help

Technorati Tags: deep linking, seo, search engines, link popularity

Are you posting in forums and message boards on a regular basis? If
not why? There is a wealth of information and an abundance of
people on them and they can help your business in a big way.

First, you can read the messages and get useful information and
ideas on how to grow your business. Some of the best advice I have
found on the internet came from forums and message boards. Along with this, be sure to say thank you to anyone who gives you useful information or helps you out in anyway.

Second, you can post your articles or websites and ask for help to
improve them. Forums are great for getting feedback.

Third, you can offer advice and build relationships and that is
what business building is all about. The big key here is to make sure that you offer free books, ecourses, and other real useful information along with your signature file linking to your website. Never ever spam.

Fourth visit the same message boards on a regular basis. Many of the same people hang out there and you will build better relationships by showing up and contributing often.

Here are some hints about where to go to find message boards:

Try going to google, yahoo and other search engines and look for
all different kinds of forums and message boards. The big key is to
not limit your search to business based boards.

For example: I am a grad student and I speak French fluently. Some
of the unique places where I post include: the French.about.com-
French language forums and the young entrepreneur forum.

Also you can search at:
http://www.forumzilla.com for forums to post to.

When deciding whether or not a forum or message board is worth
posting to, look to see when the last time someone else posted. If
it has been more than 2 months, chances are you would be wasting
your time as the board or forum is dead or almost dead, they have
low traffic and you want to post in places with high traffic.

AnnaLaura Brown is a successful home business owner who markets herself and her business on the internet. Subscribe to her free internet marketing E-course at http://www.onlinemarketinglessons.com She can also be contacted via her website http://www.scentedcandlesclub.com

Technorati Tags: Forums, message boards, internet marketing, affiliates

A highly talked about topic is the SEO world is, “Do Alt and Title Attributes Help with SEO?” Well to help shed a little light on this topic, I did some research and came up with a few good conclusions. I’m not suggesting these are 100% accurate but from my initial research they seem to be right on target. I welcome all other SEO experts to share their opinions on this topic by posting their comments – because as we all know, every little bit of information can help us all.

Well to start, I want to provide a brief introduction of each attribute to help you understand their “intended” purpose.

The alt attribute is, popularly and incorrectly referred to as an alt tag and is commonly misunderstood to provide a tool-tip for an image. Both of these are incorrect. First of all, the alt attribute is an attribute and not a tag. The alt attribute was always intended to provide alternative information about an element and is generally required for image and image maps and is not meant to be used to display a tool-tip. The alt attribute, can be used for the img, area, and input elements to help provide alternative information to users who cannot display that element in their browser. As an example, here is how you would define an alt attribute for an image: . If the image is not displayed the text, “this is our company logo” will be displayed in the place of the image.

The title attribute, on the other hand, is meant to provide additional information about an element, which is displayed as a tool-tip by most graphical browsers. The title attribute can be used to describe any HTML element except for base, basefont, head, html, meta, param, script, and title.

An excellent use for the title attribute is to provide descriptive text within an anchor tag to let the users know where the link will direct them if they click on it. When the user places their mouse over the link, it will display a small tool-tip displaying the title text that you’ve provided. An example would be < a href=”linkpath.html” title=”more information about our company”>

So as you can see the alt and title attributes have different purposes but how do they affect SEO? This is the true question we all want to know and understand. Do they help with SEO or are they simply ignored by the search engines? I tested several different scenarios, all in Google, and after my research I’ve come to the following conclusions.

Alt attributes seem to be picked up by Google, whether or not there was a link within that element. Some SEO experts have mentioned that if there is no link, then the alt attribute would not be indexed… from my research I’ve found this to be false.

Going further, I noticed in one testing scenario, if there was an image with an alt attribute and a link to a completely other site, that other site was also indexed by Google when searching for the text within the alt attribute. It was difficult for me to verify this multiple times but I definitely verified it in one testing scenario.

I also took this one step further and analyzed my results with what Google Images was displaying. I immediately noticed that Google sometimes takes the alt attribute text and provides this text as the description for the image in Google Images, something that is very valuable to know and understand when doing SEO for your website.

In all of my testing scenarios, the title attribute do not seem to be picked up by Google and adding a link to that element did not seem to affect this result at all. If you really think about it, this makes complete sense. Since you can place title attributes in almost every element of a website, it would be very easy for a user to affect the search engines by keyword stuffing throughout their web pages, something that Google and the other major players do not want, hence why title attributes do not help with SEO.

In my opinion, you should use the title attribute to help with your user’s experience and not with SEO. Since tool-tips provide more useful information to the user about images, links, fields and much more, you will help your users to understand what is happening around the web page.

So from my testing I’ve determined that a title attribute is meant to provide tool-tips to the user for user experience, whereas the alt attribute is helpful in terms of providing alternative information to the user when their browser cannot display an image or input element and helping to increase the SEO of a website. My recommendation is to pay close attention to when, where and how you are using your alt attributes. If they help with SEO, then you should pay close attention to what you are adding.

When adding images always be sure to add an alt attribute to the code of each image. If you do not have one, then just specify a blank one, such as alt=””. Also, be sure to add alternative text that is relevant to that image, the content on that page and be sure not to specify an alt attribute greater than 100 characters in length, as this may be perceived as spamming.

I hope you find my brief overview on the topic of, “Do Alt and Title Attributes Help with SEO?” to be beneficial for you and your business. I’m sure one could dive deep into this topic, spending weeks determining the differences between how Google, Yahoo! and the other major search engines handle title and alt attributes with regards to SEO for a website.

I welcome all comments and/or feedback.

At Hudson Horizons, we provide website design, development, content management, e-commerce integration, RSS content distribution, search engine optimization, e-marketing services and the development of custom applications such as blogs, newsletter systems, online payment solutions and any other Web application that may be needed to help simplify your business.

Hudson Horizons is an e-business product, solution and marketing company specializing in creating highly sophisticated customized websites, web-based software applications and providing e-marketing and SEO services for small and mid-sized businesses.

Our vision and ultimate ambition as a company is to always strive to be “The New Light for e-Business.” By offering new, innovative and extremely competitive products and solutions to our clients, we provide better ways to run and operate a business online.

Technorati Tags: alt tag, title tag, SEO,