Getting backlinks (links to your site from others) is necessary to increase your Page Rank in the long term.

Google bots are quite busy. So it is useful to have a page listing all your backlinks to tell them what pages they should analyse. That's why I recommend to dedicate one page of your site to list the pages linking to your page - I say page and not website in purpose-.

But if you're using spamming on blogs, forums and other websites to get backlinks, it would be better to keep track of those backlinks elsewhere than on your website.
Because if your website is linking to too many sites that are not related you may suffer from a downgrade backlash from Google.

So the best tool to keep track of those backlinks (the referrers) to my viewpoint is

Have a look to the tracker created for this blog: My Tracker

All my referrers are listed. When Google bots analyse this page they collect the links. And when they crawl (analyse) them later, they will find links to my blog. For a website it would be better to have a tracker for every page, but for a blog it's easier with only one.

NB: not many backlinks on my tracker because I'm not actively promoting my blog, this blog is indeed a kind of non-lucrative initiative. ;-p

Extreme Tracking has some credit with Google bots, because it's an old domain (the older your domain the better). So the tracker you set up may get a good PR with time (so put the keywords you are competing in the tracker's name when you create it !).

Other aspects of trackers:

Trackers also allow a better understanding of your visitors: you may know the referring link, the keyword used in the search engine and much more.
Data-mining may help to improve your website.

To keep track of your visitors, here below a list of free trackers (but not for SEO):

StatCounter Invisible, no Ads :-)

Activemeter Invisible, no Ads :-)

Motigo Webstats Logo + PopUnder Ads :-(

I strongly recommend the invisible counters. Unfortunately even if Motigo is user-friendly it cannot compete because of those 'damned shit' PopUnder ads.

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The Top 10 SEO Tips contained in this tutorial were created after years of experimentation with a half a dozen websites, mostly those of our clients who insisted they should be on the first page of the search engine results pages. We hope you find these SEO tips valuable. For an in-depth study of everything we know about search engine optimization, please read our eBook.

SEO Tip #1: Find the Best Keywords

It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Therefore you should invest some energy into finding the best keywords. There are several SEO tools available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords. Tip: Don't be deceived by organizations that require you to register first. The two most popular resources are WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery.com.

Below is a screenshot from WT that shows the results you'll get when doing a query for "putter". Notice that "golf putters" has the highest search volume with 100 searches in the last 24 hours, yet there are over 100,000 websites to compete against. Using the tool's Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), you'll be able to see that "custom putter" would have a better chance at higher ranking, since there are only 2,640 competing.

Here's a key part of the top 10 SEO tips: When using any SEO tool for doing keyword research, start by keeping your searches ambiguous like we did in the example above for "putters". The results will always return suggestions, sometimes surprising ones that you may not have thought of.

You can get less comprehensive results by using DigitalPoint's Keyword Suggestion Tool. This SEO tool will give you a summary of information without the KEI. Personally, I like to know how many people are competing before I design a web page.

SEO Tip #2: Discover Your Competitors

It's a fact and one of my top 10 SEO tips, that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.

My tool of choice is SEO Elite, which digs through the major search engines by keyword to not only tell you who your competitors are, but also provides you with an in-depth analysis of each competitor. The analysis includes these extremely important linking criteria (super SEO tips), such as:

• Competitor rank in the Search Engines
• Number of incoming links
• What keywords are in the title of linking page
• % of links containing keywords in the link text
• The PageRank of linking pages
• The Alexa traffic ranking information

Here is a screenshot of their SEO software that shows the search results and the module that has the email functionality:

Stats, such as the above, play a critical part in determining what tools your website will need to compete in the Internet marketing competition. SEO Elite also offers you the ability to see who the website owner is and even send emails to all websites discovered to have quality link potential.

SEO Tip #3: Optimize Your Title

The Title and META tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. Us SEO Expert's have experimented with these two pieces of code to help us reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them. Don't click off this site until you've read the top 10 SEO tips below to see what I've discovered works best for search engine optimization.

SEO Tip #3: Optimizing Your Website Title

There are different theories about how long your Title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), my Top 10 SEO Tips for the title would be to keep it under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page. However, some may argue that the value of the homepage title may warrant additional search term inclusion.

Bar none the most important of the top 10 SEO tips involves your keywords. If you wish to be on the first page of the search results, you must include your keywords in your Title tag. Preferably before all other words in the Title. No need to repeat your keywords in the Title, that's interpreted as spam by the search engines. Here is an example of good Title:

This one excercise could make or break your SEO campaign. Click-Through Rate (CTR) plays an instrumental role in how relevant Google thinks your website is. By compelling users to click with clear call-to-actions (buy, order, download, beat, fix, etc) and by using value propositions (guaranteed, on sale now, etc), one can improve their CTR and search engine ranking. Oh, don't forget to squeeze your keywords in there as well.

SEO Tip #4: Optimize Your META Tags

META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about, and despite some SEO controversy, they still play an instrumental role in meta-based search engines. The META tags you need to be the most concerned about are:

1. description
2. keywords

Sequencing of these tags may be extremely important. I say "may" because SEO is mostly hypothesis due to the changing algorithms of the search engines. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, I've noticed a significant difference when I have the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come before the META description.

The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. See the OC Internet Advertising example above. There's also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. I've seen sites with a paragraph in their description listed in the top results, so I don't think the number of characters here plays any kind of role with the search engines.

However, if you want the listing to look clear and to the point, my Top 10 SEO Tips for this META tag would be to keep it under 150 characters and to not repeat your keywords more than 3 times. It may be a coincidence, but I've also noticed ranking improvements when I put my keywords at the beginning of the description. Here's the syntax:

The last important META tag is the keywords META tag, which some time ago lost a lot of points in Google's search engine algorithm. Along with being valuable to this top 10 SEO tips list, this tag is still important to many other search engines and should not be ignored. Based on my experience with this tag, you can have approximately 800 characters in this tag (including spaces).

SEO Tip: if you repeat your keywords more than 3 times it can be a pretty good indication to the search engine that you are trying to spam their search results. Also, don't waste your time including keywords that aren't used in the BODY section of your website, that could be seen as another spam technique. Here's the syntax used on this Top 10 SEO Tips page:

SEO Tip #5: Use Headings

In college and some high schools, essays are written using a standard guideline created by the Modern Language Association (MLA). These guidelines included how to write you cover page, title, paragraphs, how to cite references, etc. On the Web, we follow the W3C's guidelines as well as commonly accepted "best practices" for organizing a web page.

Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include at least H1-H3 when assembling your page. Using cascading style Sheets (CSS), I was able to make my h1 at the top of this page more appealing. Here's a piece of code you can pop into your heading:

Since a page full of headings would look just plain silly, my SEO tip would be to fill in the blank space with paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists, images, and other content. Try to get at least 400+ words on each page.

SEO Tip #6: Use Title and ALT Attributes

More often then not, web addresses (URL's) do not contain the topic of the page. For example, the URL www.myspace.com says nothing about being a place to make friends. Where a site like www.placetomakefriends.com would tell Google right away that the site being pointed to is about making friends. So to be more specific about where we are pointing to in our links we add a title attribute and include our keywords.

Using the Title Attribute is an direct method of telling the search engines about the relevance of the link. It's also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to disabled people. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads Title and ALT attributes. The syntax is:

SEO Software

The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the Title Attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually disabled. Here's how you would use ALT in an IMG tag:

SEO Tip #7: Nomenclatures

Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is "golf putters" you'll want to save the images used on that page as golf-putters-01.jpg or golf_putters_01.jpg (either will work). It's not confirmed, but many SEO's have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media.

More important is your web page's filename, since many search engines now allow users to query using "inurl:" searches. Your filename for the golf putters page could be golf-putters.html or golf_putters.html. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to insure the content has the keywords in the filename (as well as a Title or ALT attribute).

SEO Tip #8: Create a Site Map Page

PageRank is relative and shared throughout a website by a unique voting system created by Google. I could spend two days trying to explain how PageRank works, but what it comes down to is having efficient navigation throughout your site. That where a site map page comes in. Since every page on the website will be linked to the sitemap, it allows webcrawlers (and users) to quickly and easily find content. This SEO tip is one of my favorite of top 10 SEO tips.

It use to take 4 clicks to get to a product page at www.questinc.com. By creating a site map, users and search engines can now access any page on the site with only two clicks. The PageRank from these deep pages went from 0 to 2 in about 3 months and the ranking went from virtually not existent to #1 almost across the board for nearly 2,000 pages on their site.

Feel free to search Google for any of the terms on this catalog page, such as MITSUBISHI Monitor Repair. See how powerful a site map can truly be.

SEO Tip #9: Include a robots.txt File

By far the easiest top 10 SEO tips you will ever do as it relates to search engine optimization is include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up a text editor, such as Notepad and type "User-agent: *". Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to "please feel free to crawl every page of my website".

Here's one of my best top 10 SEO tips: Because the search engine analyzes everything it indexes to determine what your website is all about, it might be a good idea to block folders and files that have nothing to do with the content we want to be analyzed. You can disallow unrelated files to be read by adding "Disallow: /folder_name/" or "Disallow: /filename.html". Here is an example of the robots.txt file on this site:

SEO Tip #10: Install a sitemap.xml for Google

Though you may feel like it is impossible to get listed high in Google's search engine result page, believe it or not that isn't Google's intention. They simply want to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. In fact, they've even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you'll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website.

For Google, these two pieces in the top 10 SEO tips would be to read the tutorial entitled How Do I Create a Sitemap File and to create your own. To view the one on this page, website simply right-click this SEO Tips Sitemap.xml file and save it to your desktop. Open the file with a text editor such as Notepad.

Effective 11/06, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will be using one standard for sitemaps. Below is a snippet of the standard code as listed at Sitemaps.org. Optional fields are lastmod, changefreq, and priority.

   

      http://www.example.com/

      2005-01-01

      monthly

      0.8

   

The equivilant to the sitemap.xml file is the urllist.txt for Yahoo!. Technically you can call the file whatever you want, but all it really contains is a list of every page on your website. Here's a screenshot of my urllist.txt:

SEO BONUS Tip: Validate Your Code

There are several ways to validate the accuracy of your website's source code. The four most important, in my opinion, are validating your search engine optimization, HTML, CSS and insuring that you have no broken links or images.

Start by analyzing broken links. One of the W3C's top 10 SEO tips would be for you to use their tool to validate links. If you have a lot of links on your website, this could take awhile.

Next, revisit the W3C to analyze HTML and CSS. Here is a link to the W3C's HTML Validation Tool and to their CSS Validation Tool.

The final step in the last of my Top 10 SEO Tips is to validate your search engine optimization. Without having to purchase software, the best online tool I've used is ScrubTheWeb's Analyze Your HTML tool. STW has built an extremely extensive online application that you'll wonder how you've lived with out.

One of my favorite features of STW's SEO Tool is their attempt to mimic a search engine. In other words, the results of the analysis will show you (theoretically) how search engine spiders may see the website.

Other SEO Tips

If you liked the SEO tips above, you're going to love my popular SEO eBook, entitled: The Four Layers of the SEO Model, How to Rank Higher in the Search Engines. It's packed full of more tips and tutorials, was well as some great ideas for developing incoming links.

Thanks for stopping by!

Web Traffic 101

Increase Site Visitors

See also: Increase Site Visitors; Increase Website Hits

A-Z Tips to Increase Site Visitors

We said A-Z and we meant it. Here are 26 sure-fire ways to increase web traffic and site visitors to your website. Use some or all of them, and let us know which ones worked best for you.

1. Optimize your site (SEO).
   Win on the search engines when people search for keyword phrases related to your products or services.
   (More about search engine optimization.)
   
   
2. Get your site listed in directories.
   Submit your site to all the major web directories. This will generate traffic directly from the directories themselves and will also help to improve your link popularity. That helps you win on Google!
   (More about web directories.)
   
   
3. Get listed in search engines.
   Submit your site to all the major search engines.
   (More about search engines.)
   
   
4. Get links to your site.
   Get people with complimentary sites to link to yours. You offer rental kayaks on the beach. Ask the local restaurant owners to link to you, and offer to link to them. Ask the local tour guides, the real estate agents, the night clubs, and everyone else. Links lead to clicks onto your website and help to improve your search engine rankings.
   
   
5. Buy links to your site.
   Buy text links on other websites. That means more spiders stopping by, more people clicking through, and better search engine rankings.
   
   
6. Buy banner ads.
   Buy banner ads on other websites. It helps to build brand recognition.
   
   
7. Participate in a banner exchange program.
   It won't cost you anything, and will lead to a few extra visitors. Plus, you're spreading your brand all over the place.
   
   
8. Participate in a WebRing.
   Connect your site with other sites in your niche.
   
   
9. Pay for clicks to your site.
   Pay for clicks or inclusion on the search engines so that people will see your site in the sponsored links section of the search results when they search for keyword phrases related to your products or services.
   (More about pay per click.)
   
   
10. Set up an affiliate marketing program.
    With affiliate marketing, you can either pay per click, pay per lead generated, pay per sale, or pay per customer acquired.
    
    
11. Use smart public relations (PR).
    Get news coverage of your business and your site. Approach online and traditional media. This will often lead to others placing links pointing to your website, which leads to more clicks and also to improved search engine rankings.
    
    
12. Use E-mail marketing.
    Ugly, but effective for the cost. Blast out your special offers, but be nice about it.
    
    
13. Use off-line marketing.
    Promote your site. Put your url on all your license plates. Paint it on your car. Buy newspaper and yellow pages ads with your url. Put up flyers and stickers. Sponsor a little league team. Do anything and everything to spread the word about your website around your city.
    
    
14. Run regular promotions.
    Stage regular giveaways and spread the word about it.
    
    
15. Get published.
    Write articles for publication on other websites. The author profile will link to your site. The article will show that you're an expert.
    
    
16. Publish yourself.
    Write articles for your own site regularly. This will help you to win on the search engines and gives your visitors a reason to come back over and over.
    
    
17. Ask for reviews.
    Ask for reviews of your self-published articles on other webmasters' websites. Ask for reviews of your website, your products, your software, your services. These will usually include links to your articles.
    
    
18. Write briefs.
    Write daily or weekly news briefs focusing in on your industry or specialty area. This keeps your site "fresh" in the eyes of the major search engines and helps you to spread a wide net when fishing for top search engine positions.
    
    
19. Create a newsletter.
    Ask your visitors to sign up for your newsletter, and encourage them to send it along to people they know. Send a newsletter regularly with teasers or lead-ins to your in-depth new articles or with special offers and the latest products.
    
    
20. Post in chat rooms.
    Become active in bulletin boards and chat rooms focusing on your industry. Leave inciteful comments, and people will click on your profile, then visit your site.
    
    
21. Give away free stuff.
    Offer something people want at your site. Give them a reason to come back and get more. Offer free downloads and update them regularly. Offer coupons or discounts. Content content content.
    
    
22. Give awards for excellent sites in your niche.
    This builds more links back to your site and establishes you as a credible reviewer, an expert in your space.
    
    
23. Run a contest and promote it.
    Photo contests, essay contests, goofy contests, random drawings, anything. Example: Messiest Garage in America contest on OfftheFloor.com.
    
    
24. Join your local business organizations.
    Chambers of Commerce and other organizations will often add your site to their member directory. That's an added advantage over the obvious business-building and networking opportunities.
    
    
25. Create an RSS feed.
    Give people another way to interact with your content.
    
    
26. Be accessible.
    Build your site so that it is accessible to all browsers and to PocketPC and Palm Pilot users. Don't forget, people with disabilities buy things too. Make your site Section 508 complaint. Your competition probably hasn't.
    
    
We really couldn't stop at Z. This last suggestion is our most important one:

Be a good Internet citizen.
Provide useful resources on your website, resources that make people feel thankful that you put in the time and effort. Help every person who ever calls you on the telephone or emails you a question. When they ask "How can I ever thank you?" just say, "If you like my site and think it's useful, why not link to it?"
(More about good Internet citizenship.)