tellyline.buzz

A reader asked a question on another blog post that I could all readers of this blog could benefit from so I’m going to address it now. Best .

That’s an excellent question and there’s no easy, quick fix to a situation like this. I would begin by asking the other search engine optimization company to give you a list of places they submitted your link to. Then you should contact those sites and ask if they’ll remove your link. If that SEO company won’t provide you a list of sites then ask them to undo what they did. If they refuse that then you can (and should do this anyway) verify your website with Google Webmaster Tools. Perform a link analysis on your site to see what inbound links you have and identify the ones from bad neighborhoods. Contact those site owners and ask them to remove your links.

If worse comes to worse and the website owners refuse to take down your links or you can’t contact them, look up the Whois information on those sites to see who the web host is. Contact the web host and let them know that they have bad neighborhoods on their servers. A reputable host will remove the sites and shut down those accounts. They will also remove your links.

Premium WordPress Themes – Multiple Sites

It may seem intuitive. You need relevant inbound links. They need to be relevant. They should come from authoritative sites within your niche. Why not just build a bunch of sites within your niche with different domain names and link them together?

There are some dangers in doing this. First, if all of your sites are hosted through the same web host then it is likely that they will exist on the same web server. That’s a big red flag where the search engines are concerned. Several sites linking to each other and that exist on the same server are too closely related to be of any good to each other. They are likely owned by the same person or group of people so it’s like a mini-network of sites and Google has pretty much killed networks.

Even if you solved the server class problem, there are issues. Suppose you host all of your domains at different hosting companies. That way they are all on different servers and different IP blocks. Good for you. If they are all linking to each other with no links out to other relevant sites and no, or few, inbound links from other relevant sites, it still looks like the link pattern of a network and it will be likely be treated that way by the search engines.

Furthermore, if your sites are all registered under the same name then your Whois data could be giving you away.

While it’s possible to fool the search engines today, you likely won’t get away with any long term strategy of link networking. It is best to build quality content and develop social proof. The search engines will treat you better.

Premium WordPress Themes – How Many

When it comes to link building there is no way to overemphasize the importance of backlinks. It is pretty much common knowledge that you need them. Different search engine optimization experts will put varying degrees of emphasis on them, but all SEOs pretty much agree that they are important. How important are they? Do you need thousands? Hundreds? How many is enough?

There’s no easy answer to the how much is enough question. It depends on a lot of factors, primarily the competitive nature of your niche. One keyword in a very competitive niche may require tens or hundreds of thousands of thousands of backlinks just to make a dent, and a small one at that, in the armor of your competition. Why bother beating your head against a stone wall?

Instead, go for the smaller, less competitive keywords first. The ones that won’t require an army of link builders to spread artillery all over kingdom come just to sound like the squeak of a mouse. If you target those less competitive key phrases and get respectable traffic from those, once you capture the top of the search engine rankings for the long tail phrases, you’ll start to see yourself climb for the more generic phrases within your niche. But it takes time. And patience.

How many backlinks does it take to succeed? One more than you had yesterday. Just keep plugging away, one link at a time, until you win.

Premium WordPress Themes – Linking Strategy

Do you have a diverse link building strategy or are you too focused? One of the biggest mistakes new webmasters make is to get too focused on one method of building links. That’s a sure way to kill your link building before you even start. If you want to make the most of building inbound links to your website then you should seriously consider building links from a variety of sources and not just one. But what sources?

The following list is a good list of places to build inbound links to your website as part of your long term search engine optimization efforts. Don’t just hone in one one.

Here is a list of some very good type of relevant links to use:

• Commenting on other blogs
• Local profiles
• Niche blogs
• Video online marketing
• Article marketing
• Forums
• Directory submissions
• Social networking profiles
• Social bookmarking
• Niche blogs
• Related websites
• Ping lists (for blogs)

The key to link building is to seek out links from a variety of types of websites and authoritative sources. You don’t have to target all A-list sites or all sites within your own niche. It’s OK to step outside of the boundaries as long as you aren’t spamming people and trying to get something for nothing. Be a part of a community. Give, then get.

Do you know the difference between anchor text and a call to action? A call to action is any phrase that you use on your website or blog to get a user to do something. You can ask for a sale, a newsletter subscription, or just simply say “click here”. That’s a call to action. 2018.

Anchor text is using keywords within a hypertext link to assist the search engines in valuing that link for search marketing purposes. But can it serve as a call to action?

The short answer is, yes. In fact, using anchor text as a call to action is a powerful linking technique because not only do you get the search engine marketing benefits that go with using the anchor text, but if the link is an effective call to action then you’ll also increase your sales and marketing power. It will lead to increased conversions.

An example of a good link with a strong call to action and well-placed anchor text is right here below:

Click here to earn more about our SEO Service

Notice the phrase “SEO Service”. That’s my anchor text. But “learn more about SEO” could just as well be the anchor text. It’s a phrase that some people, albeit fewer, might use to search for information online. And it’s a link. The call to action is “click here”. It’s clear what I want my reader to do. If they are interested in link building they should click the link to learn how to do it. Anyone interested in learning about link building is promised a benefit. And that’s how you use anchor text as a call to action.

Premium WordPress Themes – Nofollow Attribute

Here’s another interesting new angle on a product that may be a good one, but since I haven’t used it I can’t vouch for it. But the interesting thing about this article is a startling statistic:

What’s this mean? Most of the people using nofollow as an attribute are doing it for PageRank sculpting reasons. They’re not selling links at all, which is the original reason Google introduced nofollow so that link sellers could sell links and not be penalized for selling PageRank. Instead, it’s being used differently. Three quick questions:

• Does this mean link sellers are still selling PageRank?
• Is the PageRank sculpting practice all that effective for those webmasters who are using it?
• Will Google kill the nofollow attribute?

If you’ve been reading this blog the last few days then you know that Google’s Matt Cutts has publicly stated that PageRank sculpting is not all that effective. Is that just Googlespeak for “don’t do it guys”? Maybe Google really doesn’t like PageRank sculpting and their just trying to find a nice way of discouraging webmasters from doing it. Nevertheless, it appears their efforts aren’t working. People are doing it anyway.

That leads to the question, Will Google kill it? Will nofollow be trashed as a failed experiment? Would webmasters using PageRank do better in the long run by not using it? What do you think? Is Google on the verge of pissing off a lot of big site owners again with another change to its algorithms or will this just blow over as another development in Web history?

Premium WordPress Themes – Build Authority

This blog post may be about PageRank sculpting, but it’s really about something else: The value of outbound linking.

Many site owners believe they should just link to themselves internally. That’s not very smart, actually. Outbound linking really helps you in a number of ways.

• If done smartly, it can increase your PageRank
• Again, if done smartly, your human visitors will see you as someone who is an authority who is willing to link to other sites if they have value
• You’ll be seen by search engine bots and humans as a high value site
• Your site becomes more social and you’ll get more participation from others
• Outbound links can sometimes leave an automatic trackback on another website, which can deliver additional traffic to your site

Reserving all of your links to internal pages may seem like a smart thing to do, but it’s really not. The linking strategy is one that ecompasses a variety of internal and outbound links that shows your site visitors that you are willing to share useful and valuable high authority resources with them.

Premium WordPress Themes – Cool Ideas

When it comes to link building there are a lot of ideas floating around. Most of them you’ve probably heard of:

• Article marketing
• Directory submissions
• Link baiting
• Online publicity
• Social media marketing
• Give away a blog theme
• Throw a contest

You get the picture. They’re all over the place. And these ideas have been rehashed over and over again. But I’ve got 5 link building methods that I’ll mention below that don’t get mentioned very often and they are really cool and unique to implement. Try them out!

• Start a microblog – Seriously, I’m not talking about Twitter or Tumblr here. I’m talking about a standalone miniature blog. WordPress theme and all. For $10 a year you can build a little blog site, throw an article or two on it and link it back to your website then totally forget about it. When that site is 10 years old you’ll have one awesome inbound link.
• Post in .gov and .edu forums – It’s no secret that .gov and .edu domain names are really valuable. The links in particular are really valuable. I mean, really valuable.
• Be a guest blogger – This one is starting to pick up steam, but it’s not quite to the point of being real popular yet. Blog for another blog in your niche. You’ll get a link.
• Join Rateitall – Post a review, get rated, and rate others’ reviews. Get links.
• Start a petition – Encourage people in your niche to sign it.

There are plenty more ways to build links. In fact, Carl Ocab has 69 link building ideas right here. Check them out.

JavaScript is an interesting tool. It isn’t crawlable so therefore any links you find in a script will not be crawled back to the source. On the other hand, search engines can detect the inbound links produced from JavaScript. In other words, you can get credit for inbound links that are hidden inside of JavaScript even though the links themselves won’t be crawled by the search engines. The .

Before you start talking about using JavaScript for paid links, consider that Google currently doesn’t penalize sites for paid links within JavaScript. But here’s the catch: They may start doing so at any time.

Do you really want to risk paying for thousands of inbound links only to have those links discounted a year or two down the road? That’s a big risk. A better plan is to take a play from Amazon.com. Amazon builds links using JavaScript, but those links are affiliate links. With its affiliate program, Amazon has thousands upon thousands of websites building links to it using the company’s autogenerated JavaScripts. These JavaScripts promote a single product or group of products and if a visitor clicks on those links to land on Amazon’s site and make a purchase, the website owner who sent them over to Amazon’s site gets a commission because that site owner’s affiliate ID is programmed into the JavaScript as well.

You can build inbound links using JavaScript if you do it the right way. You don’t have to buy links and hope that Google never changes its policy.

Premium WordPress Themes – Links Flowing

As you start to execute the link building part of your search engine optimization strategy, I would recommend to make sure you always try to keep it natural.

Doug Caverly at smallbusinessnewz reports on Phil Orford, the CEO of the Forum of Private Business, taking a casual 84 mile walk over the four days for a children’s charity. It’s no mean feat and will be reported in dozens of places around the web and the reports will no doubt include links back to his site.

In fact Doug Caverly’s report links to both the web site and the Twitter profile. If you, or one of your employees is involved in a fund raising venture like this, particularly where sponsorship is involved, why not broadcast the fact. At the very least you may end up with more sponsors therefore raising more money for the event. If others pick up the story and link back it’s a bonus – a welcome bonus.

The links you receive are not going to be keyword targeted so they will not be the premium quality you need, however, a link is a link and they do all help. Is it ethical – as I said to at the start, I wouldn’t dash off and do anything just to get links. If you normally participate in a major fund raising event, advertise it and help the event, and yourself.

If your interested, you can sponsor Phil Orford through PayPal on his CCLG site – and there is another link! He is Twittering his way through the event as well and it makes for an interesting read.

Premium WordPress Themes – Link Juice

If you’ve been wondering whether or not to use short URLs, there are some advantages and some disadvantages. From a link building point of view, short URLs send link juice, but not to the destination URL. Rather, they send link juice back to the redirection service, the URL shortener.

Here’s what happens when someone clicks on a short URL:

They first go to the short URLs website (this is very brief as you’ll see in a moment)
Then they are redirected to the destination page, the page represented by the URL the shortened URL represents

Because traffic is first diverted to the short URL service, and link value along with it, you are adding link juice to the link vault of the URL shortening service rather than the website of the page you want your visitors to go to. That may or may not be important. If it is a page on your own website then you’d be better off using the long URL. If it is on a property that you own or that you want to build links to then you should use the long URL. If the site is an affiliate site and you are just trying to earn money from your visitors then the short URL service may be more beneficial than not.

This is one of those things where you have to weight the good with the bad. Just know that short URLs services don’t pass link juice to the final destination page and if you want that, don’t use the short URL service.

Premium WordPress Themes – Develop Authority

You hear this word “Authority” thrown around these days. People use it for all kinds of reasons. In one sense, authority is a word that describes the depth of a person’s knowledge. On another level, it simply means the power to which an individual has been elevated over others. Either way, people respect it.

Authority can be abused. It can be acquired in less than honorable ways. But when legitimate, authority is a powerful force and when used for good it’s even more powerful. And that’s why you want to focus your efforts on becoming an authority in your niche.

A strongly search engine optimized website is good, but it will only take you so far. Authority, however, will take you to the ends of the earth and back again. And when you’ve achieved a certain level of authority, about the only thing that can take you down is your own stupidity, a big mistake, an ethical blunder, or a crime. Otherwise, if you are considered an authority by a large mass of people then you can ride a long way on the tallest waves just on that alone.

The problem with authority is that it takes a long time to build. It doesn’t happen overnight. Sure, you might have never heard of a certain individual then overnight they popped up on the radar screen, making it seem like they achieved instant success. But their authority has any real value, you can bet they spent years developing it. And you will too. But it’s well worth it.

Brian Clark wrote a free e-book titled Authority Rules. It’s a darn good read. If you don’t know who Brian Clark is then you are probably new to blogging and possibly even Internet marketing. Or you may just not be paying attention. But he’s one of the most respected authorities on blogging and authority so he’s someone you should listen to. It will tell you the 10 things you should do to develop authority in your niche and you don’t even have to pay for it.

If you work in an area where good white hat search engine optimization means hitting page 3 with your on-page efforts but you just can’t seem to get your pages ranked any higher then it is possibly to push those pages further up in the listings. You need to undertake an ongoing relevant link building campaign. .

Link building is not as difficult as some people make it out to be. It isn’t enough to seek out a large quantity of links. Quality links are just as important and developing a “trust factor” for your company. But what is meant by “quality link”?

The quality question in link building is not so easy to answer. Like on-page SEO, there are a number of factors that affect a link’s quality. All of them affect link quality to varying degrees and when you measure the aggregate of their affects you could walk away with a higher quality link using different variables on any given day of the week. In general, however, link quality is determined by some or all of the following criteria:

• Relevant anchor text
• PageRank of the page being linked from
• PageRank of the site being linked from
• Relevance of the web page linking to you
• Relevance of the website linking to you
• Age of the linking web page
• Age of the linking website
• Age of the link itself
• Link diversity (After a couple hundred links, one more link from the same type of website that all your previous links are from becomes less valuable whereas a link from a different type of website increases in value)
• Overall authority of the web page linking to you
• The linking website’s overall authority
• Anchor text variance (just like link diversity, after awhile the value of a certain anchor text decreases with overuse while other anchor text value may increase)

Building inbound relevant links to a page over time that has moderately good rankings when you want to push it up in the rankings requires some careful thought as to the anchor text you use in your links and the pages that you seek links from. You want to be careful not to choose bad neighborhoods. Depending on the competitive landscape of your niche, it could take a few hundred links or several thousand relevant in bound links to develop a solid trust factor in the eyes of the search engines and to build your rankings and visitors over time.

Premium WordPress Themes – New Directories

Web directories are a great source of link building as part of your long term blended approach to search engine optimization. They always have been and always will be. And there are always new directories popping up to take place of the old ones that are dying. Most directories just don’t stick around for long. So you can build 100 back links from online directories and within two years half of those are no longer in existence. They’ve died because the directory owner has decided to maintaining a directory is too hard and time consuming. Many directory owners go in it for the money and when they find out that you can’t make a lot of money from a directory without putting in some really hard work and long hours they end up quitting. Your links die and dead links don’t do any good.

That’s why it’s important to keep building links by submitting your site to new directories as they pop up if they are relevant in nature and are white hat. It is time consuming, but necessary. So many webmasters abandon the directory submission process and by doing so kill their link building campaigns. That’s why they never rise above a PR 3.

But you don’t have to do that. You should always be looking for new directories to submit your websites to. If you submit to enough directories you can beat the link attrition rate for your site. Remember, you will lose so many links each year to old sites dying. You have to replace those with new links. You do that by staying ahead of the attrition rate.

The best way to stay on top of new directories as they come out is to subscribe to Google Alerts. You’ll get an e-mail every time your keyword is triggered by a new site. Subscribe to alerts for “directory”, “web directory, and “website directory” and every time a new directory goes online you can go up and submit your website. Do this enough times and you’ll always grow your links faster than you lose them.

Premium WordPress Themes – Link Limit

Does Google have a 100 link per page limit? No. Not according to Matt Cutts. In fact, Google’s never really had a 100 link per page limit. As Matt says, the reason Google gave for that 100 links per page thing was because of a limitation in Google’s indexing quality. That limitation no longer exists, but even if it did that’s not the point anyway.

Spam. That’s the point. User experience. That’s the second point.

Link farms used to be quite popular and after awhile they quit being effective because too many users would show up on a web page, look at massive amounts of links, and leave. No clicks. No scans. No reads. Just bounces. Google figured out that users didn’t want to see a page full of links.

But what if you have 250 links on a page that is composed of three columns of text where each column is content broken up by heads, subheads, photos, images, and other graphics, laid out with tables and CSS and meets all the standards of W3C, looks attractive, and is functional. In other words, it’s not just a page that consists of link after link after link after link until your eyes go hyperlink blue.

What if a savvy webmaster put together a really useful set of resources on a particular topic and it was broken up into subtopics, each with a separate header and an associated graphic with text wrap around, an introductory summary followed by 10-25 links, and a lead-in into the next subtopic? Getting the picture?

See this example of a page with 109 links before the section titled “Join the Conversation”. Now suppose this page had 20 chapters and twice as many links. Would it be a useful page? Absolutely. And I don’t think Google would have any issue with it. As long as you aren’t using blackhat search engine optimization techniques with hidden text and links, stuffed keywords, and such then you should have a good page of solid content. The number of links is irrelevant.

We’ve all heard it said that content is king. There is an argument going around, and has been for a long time now, about what is more important – keywords or links. It’s like asking what is more important for the human body: Food or water? Well, you need both to live. The .

When it comes to website development, your website needs both keywords and links. You must have some kind of internal link structure. Otherwise, all you’ve got are a bunch of loosely connected single pages. But without keywords, true search engine optimization can’t take place. Search engine optimization relies on keywords and links working together in tandem for maximum effectiveness.

Instead of asking whether links or keywords are more valuable, webmasters should be asking themselves what they can do to maximize their optimization opportunities.

Premium WordPress Themes – Link Architecture

Google Webmaster Central Blog posted its second in the series on links yesterday and the topic was link architecture. Before commenting, let’s define link architecture:

Simply put, link architecture is how you structure your internal links – your page to page links. Personally, I prefer two methods of link architecture and I recommend using them both.

• Crawlable navigation menu
• In-text links

• Crawlable Navigation Menus
  A crawlable navigation menu is one that is HTML-based, not Javascript or dynamic php. You might think the flashy navigation bars and drop down menus are cool, and maybe your human visitors will too, but the search engines won’t be able to crawl them. Anything not crawlable by the search engines will hinder your search rankings. Why do it?

  You are much better off with simple links as a navigation menu. It’s OK to have buttons and the buttons can serve as the hyperlinks. You can also hyperlink the text overlaying the button, but stay away from Flash menus, php menus that require mouseovers and mouse actions for activation. They are not crawlable.

  While Google has said that it now has the capability to crawl text within Flash, that capability is still limited and none of the other search engines can do it. While the text may be crawlable, the anchor text likely will not register as heavily as anchor text within HTML code. Why take that risk?

• In-Text Links
  In addition to the navigation menu, which should only have your most valuable page links on it, you should also have some in-text links sprinkled throughout your body content that encourages your visitors to visit other pages on your site. This is the best internal linking structure available. The search engines love to crawl in-text links and human visitors are more likely to click those links as well if they are used properly, intelligently, and sparingly. In other words, don’t litter your pages with links, but use the links strategically to drive traffic where you want it to go.

  I think the best use of in-text links is within a tiered site structure. If you map out your website in a Tier 3 fashion where your home page is tier 1, pages in the navigation menu are tier 2, and emplacing in-text links from your tier 2 pages to your tier 3 pages, then you ‘ll have an intelligent site structure that search engines will find crawlable and your human visitors will find easy to use.

• Bonus Link Architecture Method: Sitemaps
  Sitemaps are not necessary for every site. I think small sites with 20 pages or less don’t need them if they are easily crawlable by the search engines. I believe sitemaps are only necessary for larger sites that require more work from the search engines, and your human visitors, to find what they are looking for. Even then, a sound link architecture is better than trying to put a band-aid on a sore site with a sitemap. The sitemap won’t fix architectural problems. It might even make them worse. You are much better off working on a good link architecture and getting it to work for you then augmenting it with a sitemap only when your site is large enough to require one.
• Link Architecture Bottom Line
  The bottom line on link architecture is to develop a site structure that is both search engine friendly and human visitor friendly. It’s the most important thing to learn about links and there is no substitute. A solid link architecture rich with relevant anchor text will do more to increase your search engine standing than anything else related to links. It’s the bottom line.

Premium WordPress Themes – Old Links

The Google Webmaster Blog is about to piss off a lot of people. They’re going to discuss links in a four-part series, starting with the overview, which was today. Tomorrow they’ll discuss internal links. The day after they’ll cover outbound links. On day 4 the topic will be inbound links.

The reason I think they’re going to piss people off is when they get to day 4 they’re going to tell people not to buy links and quit wasting all your time obsessing on inbound links.

I think links are important, but there’s no reason to obsess. Too many webmasters are scrambling from here to there looking for the right combination of links, buying into paid link schemes, and riding the next wave of stupidity to Crash and Burn City. If you’ve been there before then you know it’s not much of a sight and you’ll definitely not want to go back.

Inbound links are good. Some are better than others. But let Google tell you straight up as I think they will: They’re not gold.

This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There are many more reasons why you might want to start your very own blog. Perhaps if you see blogging as a hobby or you want to write about a hobby of yours and you don’t expect your blog to make you any money then you might go to one of the free blog hosts, but I wouldn’t recommend it even then. The best offer versatile built-in design options. Here’s why you don’t want your blog on a free blog host:

• Loss of Control
• Host Won’t Allow Advertising
• Credibility
• Flexibility

Premium WordPress Themes – Control Your Blog

Many bloggers have fallen into this pitfall. They set up a blog on a free host only to have that blog frozen or deleted altogether without notice or explanation. Most free blog hosts will have it in their guidelines that they can do this and you can’t do anything about it. When you sign the agreement form you are essentially giving them permission to take away your blog at any time. Blogger beware!
Free Blog Hosts May Not Allow Advertising – Even AdSense
Free blog hosts typically make their revenue off of AdSense and other advertising streams. They don’t want you competing with them. Therefore, they don’t allow advertising. Guess what? You lose!
Credibility
Most blog readers look down upon free blog hosts. If they visit your blog they will not consider you the expert that someone with a dedicated domain name is. Furthermore, a MicroSoft study shows that 75% of the blogs on Blogger.com are responsible for sending out spam. If you are mixed up in that crowd then you may be perceived as a spammer by association. You don’t want to get a bad reputation before you start, do you?
Flexibility
Most free blog hosts do not have the level of flexibility that software like WordPress has. For instance, on free blog hosts, you may not have the ability to create categories or tag your posts. You also likely will not be able to trackback, an important ability for a blogger. With WordPress, you have all the tools you need to run a successful business blog.
The Real Way To Run A Business Blog
If you are going to start a blog for your business then here’s the recommended path:

• Purchase a domain name
• Download WordPress
• Install WordPress on your domain name
• Configure WordPress
• Start blogging
• Promote your blog

Premium WordPress Themes – Website Analytics

If you’re not paying attention to what visitors on your website are doing, you should. How else are you going to improve your website to capitalize on your strengths and tweak your weaknesses? Without a proper analysis of visitor activity, you are like a man trying to paddle a boat without an oar.

You should receive some basic information from your web hosting company that will help you analyze visitor activity. If not, then you should change web hosting companies. That web hosting company should include statistics about the number of visitors who visit your website, how long they stay there, which pages they visit while they are there, how long they spend on each page, entry and exit points for each visitor, and the less important number of hits your website receives.

Don’t focus on hits, however. A hit is widely misused by people who don’t understand how to analyze their traffic. A hit is simply how many times information has been requested by a server. That can include each graphic on each page. So one visitor to a web page with 25 graphics will register as 25 hits. That is terribly misleading.

A more accurate measure of traffic is the average number of visitors your receive during a certain period of time – daily, weekly, monthly, etc. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that if your traffic keeps going up in a measurably dramatic way that you have built a fabulous website. You should ask other questions like how long visitors are staying on your website, how long they are on each page, and through what doorways they enter and exit. These statistics can give you some clues as to how your website is actually performing.

For instance, if you receive 1,000 unique visitors per month and 80% of those leave your website within 10 seconds after visiting one page then you should conclude that there is something on that page that is making them leave. What is it? Maybe it isn’t the type of information they are looking for, maybe it is the aesthetic of the site, or maybe they don’t like that picture of you and your mother fishing off the coast of Panama. Your job is to figure that out and fix it.

On the other hand, if you find that 80% of your 1,000 unique visitors stay on your website for 4-5 minutes and visit 5-6 pages then you should conclude that they are finding something they like. But what? And why aren’t they buying anything? If they are staying long enough to purchase something and leave empty handed then maybe you are not making it easy for them to make a purchase. Again, your job is to figure it out and fix it.

Another important telling factor is the page into which visitors enter your website and from what source they find you. Are they Googling you and entering an internal page three tiers removed from your home page or finding your index page in a niche regional directory? That’s important to know. It could be a clue as to how you can fix your problems.

Exit points are also important. Are your visitors clicking links and leaving your site? Maybe you should close some doors. Are they staying too long on your site when they should be clicking the links? Maybe the ads you sell need to be better written.

However your website is performing, you must spend some time analyzing your traffic. Use the right tools and figure out how your visitors are acting. Are they acting the way you want them to? If not, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

If you are new to webmastering you may have heard of a bounce rate. But what is it? There really are two ways to define bounce rate. Every are not only beautifully designed for your business.

• Percentage of Visitors Who See One Page – Some analytics software define bounce rate as the percentage of people who only view one page on your website. They may stay on that one page for a couple of minutes, but they don’t go any further. They read a little bit and move on. You don’t have enough mojo to keep them around longer, therefore they “bounce” off to somewhere else.
• Percentage Of Visitors Who Leave Your Site After A Short Period Of Time – Another way to measure bounce rate is by the length of time visitors spend on your site. Most analytics software define this amount of time as five seconds or less. Some use a minute. But whatever the length of time is, it isn’t long enough to say that the visitor has a real interest in your content.

Ideally, you want your site visitors to stick around long enough to order something. If you run a retail site, you want them to checkout. If you sell services, you want them to purchase, or come back later and make a purchase. But you want them to be genuinely interested in what you have to offer. If your site is an affiliate site then you want your visitors to purchase from your affiliates. To do that, they’ve got to stick around long enough to be genuinely interested in your content.

The best way to ensure that people stick around is to give them what they want. Understand what your target market wants and provide it for them. That means making the absolute most out of your content. But it also means marketing your website to the search engines effectively. Your bounce rate is an important part of analytics and can tell you a great deal about your traffic and the quality of visitors you are getting.

WordPress Premium Themes – Webmaster Central

The Google Webmaster Central Blog posted a review of its developments from last year just two days ago. It was a good list. If I were to say which development is the most important I’d have to go with the Video Sitemaps announcement last month. As more and more people go online and more people start using higher bandwidth connections, more marketers will start using video. This will become a very important tool for a lot of viral video marketers in 2008. It also has huge potential to be a long-lasting tool that will serve webmasters for many years to come, and will only improve along the way.

Other notable developments for Google Webmaster Central last year include:

• Moved out of beta
• Extended support for link queries
• Introduction of the Message Center
• Robots.txt file analyzer
• Geographic targeting feature

I highly recommend that you subscribe to the Google Webmaster Central Blog. It’s one of the most important tools for webmasters anywhere online.

WordPress Premium Themes – Blogging Platform

Not everyone uses WordPress for blogging and if current predictions from none other than Aaron Wall of SEO Book, “In the next 2 or 3 years, Drupal will be the CMS of choice.” These are echoes of what Brain Turner of Web Pro News said a couple of months ago when he said to, keep an eye out on Drupal as a potential CMS for the future.” I must confess that before reading Aaron Wall’s article, I had not looked into Drupal much, but his write up got me interested and I have to say, it looks good.

Turner makes some very interesting observations in his article which I feel worthy of repeating.
On integrating websites:

I think it’s especially important to leave plenty of room to manoeuvre with video, because if you can make & integrate that into a website, you have become a TV channel – and that means potential syndication in the still embryonic but rapidly expanding IPTV market.

On WordPress:

My problem as a webmaster is that while WordPress suits blogs and small sites fine, it simply isn’t geared to community participation – featured author and commentator profile pages are not a default part of the set-up, plus WordPress has never really integrated community forums.

I love WordPress as a blogging platform, but I do tend to agree that it is somewhat limited. Nucleus CMS is a little better, but still very much blog oriented. Joomla is an alternative and while it has some very good points to it, the blogging platform is just plain nasty.

On Joomla:

(Note on Joomla: I’ve never liked the structure or coding – seems a very bloated, over-crowded attempt to create a CMS that somehow seems to struggle with basic functionality. Having been asked to look at SEO issues with Joomla a few times, I’ve developed an complete dislike of the platform – so much so that when a charity recently approached me looking for free SEO work on their CMS, I advised they would do better if I rebuilt it in WordPress for them.)

I tend to take a less harsh view on Joomla, it has some very good points to it. It is easy to install and pretty intuitive, but it is a little bloated and requires quite a bit of customization. In my examination of Drupal, I have to say it looks very nice indeed. There are a large number of high quality free themes and looks like it will be ready to go straight out of the box. That is a refreshing change. Keep an eye on Drupal, it looks great and I think that no small number of people are going to be thinking the same thing. I would say it is going to start taking off over 2008. I don’t see any established WordPress blogs making the switch. WordPress covers basic blogging needs and can be enhanced enough with plug-ins to keep doing what it is required to do.

WordPress Premium Themes – Metrics for Your Blogs

There are some great metrics plug-ins for popular blog scripts. Metrics is a great way to give you further insight into what is going on in your blog, especially if you are not the only person writing. Metrics programs will give you all sorts of useful information relating to your site. If you want to know how many words your writers have written, or how well they converse with their audience, check the metrics. Metrics can help you to identify your key writers.

As a general rule, if you are running a blog as a full time enterprise and have more than one writer, then you should definitely consider metrics. Even if you are the only writer, metrics might be worth taking a look at. If nothing else it gives you feedback of what you are doing on your site.

A well thought out search engine optimization plan is important to the survival of a website but let’s take a step back for a moment. Best free and for any website.

Does your website look good? If you landed on your site would you submit your information or buy anything? Many business owners try to save money by building a website themselves. If you are not a designer leave it up to the professionals. A professionally designed website is just as important as your online marketing efforts. What good is driving traffic to a website if it doesn’t convert well due to poor design and layout?

If you are looking for web design quotes Quote Catcher has made it very easy for you. With an easy three step process Quote Catcher can find the right web design firm that fits into your style and budget. Don’t worry about being bothered by a few hundred different design firms either, QuoteCatcher only sends out your information to five different vendors depending on your provided information. QuoteCatcher is safe an easy to use so you know that your personal information is safe once you submit. Finding the right web design firm could difficult an overwhelming. Quote Catcher gives you a helping hand on deciding the right one for any product or audience.

Premium WordPress Themes – Always Accurate

Part of your search engine optimization strategy is the study of analytics particularly when it comes to where your visitors are coming from and what search terms they are using to find you.

I know some search engine optimization consultants keep a daily watch on sites to track exactly what effects their actions are having on the sites they have been optimizing. It seem that, for about a week, Google analytics had problems with their databases and data displayed was incorrect. The admission from Google was simple and straightforward:

Google Analytics experienced a data processing error from April 30th to May 5th. Almost all of the data has been recovered and is currently being reprocessed. The recovered data will be reflected in your reports within a few days. Please note that a small percentage of data, particularly in the area of e-commerce reporting, was not recoverable from those dates.

If you do rely on Google Analytics then you may see some strange results for that period in early May. Search engine optimization can be an inexact science at the best of times, relying on analytics that may at times be astray on increases the inexact aspects. I wonder how many consultants went back to their strategies to see why they weren’t receiving the expected results?

Sometimes it pays to use an analytics source that has a fee associated with it. When using a free service there is little recourse for any search engine optimization consultant to recoup extra expenditure caused by the incorrect data supplied. At least with a paid service you could expect some level of accountability.

Consultants often rely on analytics to track the progress of the sites that they are working on; poor data can lead to poor decisions. Find an accurate data source and your search engine optimization strategies can at least be undertaken efficiently.

Premium WordPress Themes – Custom Search

If you have Adsense for Search options on your web site then you will be interested to know that Google have updated the search facility and it is now powered by Custom Search. As the name implies, you can customize many of the search features for your web site (or blog).

These features include:(courtesy of Adsense blog)

• Site Search: you can choose to provide just site search so users can find all the information they’re looking for on your site.
• Improved indexing of your pages:AdSense for search will now index even more pages of your site, as long as we’re able to crawl them, so that your users will see more results from your site in your AdSense for search results.
• Vertical search:You can also allow your users to search across multiple sites – this could be a network of sites that you own or other related sites that you think your users might find useful.
• Tuning search results and ads with keywords: Search terms can have different meanings in different contexts, so you can now configure your search engine with relevant keywords.
• Selecting ad location: Do you want ads to appear at the top and bottom of your search results? Or along the right sidebar as well, just like on Google.com? Now you can make the call on where ads are placed.
• Quick and easy updates: Just as you use our ad management feature to quickly change the settings for your ad and referral units, you’ll be able to do the same for your search engine within your AdSense account.

This should provide a much better system and possibly a better return for publishers using Adsense for Search. Customization is certainly an improvement on the previous search options.

Premium WordPress Themes – Top 20

One feature I like about Google Webmaster Central is the Top 20 Queries tool. You can check to see what the top 20 queries for each of your websites are AND which ones are the most clicked on. This information is helpful to you as a webmaster for a couple of reasons. First, you need to know how people are finding your website. The top 20 queries allows you to see at a glance what queries people are seeking information on and which ones your site appears for. It even tells you the lineup in the SERPs for the pages you rank for. Secondly, if you see pages that you rank for but you are not appearing in the second column for (which queries people are clicking on) then you need to re-optimize those pages or tweak them so that you “get the click.”

Another detail that you can glean from this information is keywords you want to rank for but don’t. If pages that you want to rank for do not appear in the first list then you need to figure out a way to get them there. It may mean you need to optimize those pages better or it could mean you need more link building. Whatever the case, it’s time to analyze and see how you can keep improving. Search queries tell you a lot of information about where you fall in line against your competitors for your Search Engine Optimization efforts. Pay attention to them.

Webmasters love tools, but how many do you need? Do you need every single tool available or can you get by with just a few. Most popular 2018. Search Engine Optimization Journal has compiled a list of essential webmaster tools – the ones you can’t get by without:

• Keyword Research Tool – You can spend thousands of dollars on some fancy gadget with bells and whistles or you can opt for the free version that does the job. Google’s Keyword Research Tool works for everyone.
• Link Popularity Check – You’ll need to check your link popularity from time to time. Again, you don’t need a bunch of fancy tools with bells and whistles. Marketleap not only reports your link popularity but it also tells you what your search engine saturation is. Two tools in one.
• Analytics – You can’t fix what you don’t measure. Know your stats. Again, you don’t have to spend a lot of money when you can get it all for free from Google.
• Code-to-Text Checker – Code-to-Text ratio is a very important measure of how well you’ve SEOd your website. Too much code could slow your load time. Know whether your website passes must with SEOChat’s code-to-text checker.

There are other really cool tools you could add to your arsenal. If you thought I was going to say an HTML editor or CMS, well, you can have them but are they essential? If you build your site with a CMS then you don’t need the HTML editor, and vice-versa. But if you want to build a website and you need tools, these tools are the bare minimum essentials. Don’t do anything without them.

Premium WordPress Themes – Advanced Segmentation

Google Analytics just keeps getting better and better. The Google Analytics blog recently announced that it has added advanced segmentation as a feature. The implications for usage and reporting here go far beyond what is amenable to running a PPC campaign. You can also segment your organic traffic.

What is a segment? Here’s a good definition straight from the Google Analytics blog:

Usually, it refers to a subset of visitors whose behavior you would like to see and analyze.

So if you want to segment your visitors into paid search and organic search and then break each of those down into traffic that has converted to sales, that’s advanced segmentation. You can see whether your organic search campaign is converting more visitors or your PPC campaign is converting more. With that level of analysis available to you, you can do some awesome planning and tweaking to your search engine marketing efforts. Don’t you agree?

The benefits to advanced segmentation are humongous. The problem for most small businesses will be in finding the time to learn all the new features and how to use them. That’s why it may be in your best interest to hire a professional to assist you. Let them handle the advanced segmentation details so you can focus on what you do best.

Premium WordPress Themes – Flash Video

Ever wonder how many people are watching your videos and responding to the offers directly from the video? Well, now you can. Google Analytics has announced tracking for Adobe Flash.

From the looks of things you’ll be able to use the Google Analytics tracking code to keep track of several stats regarding your videos including

• Embeds
• Microsites
• Widgets
• Flash-based games

That’s good news.

What you’ll be able to know about the people watching your videos include

• How many
• Are they targeted?
• Is the video marketing working?

In other words, you’ll be able to know if your online videos are leading to conversions. If not, how can you change that? That’s powerful information and I think it will increase the number of the people who start using online video to promote their brands.

The tracking code will track more than just Adobe Flash, and this is perhaps the best news about Google Analytics’ announcement. The formats supported are

• Flash visual component
• Flash AS3 library
• Flex MXML component
• Flex AS3 library

Plus, the tracking code is open source so it just keeps getting better! If you’ve been daydreaming about the ability to track your video marketing campaigns then now’s your chance. Have at it.

WordPress Themes Premium – Cadillac Status

Google Analytics recently added a couple of new features that are incredibly useful. The first feature is a motion chart. If you are a new user of Google Analytics you may not have this feature yet, but if you’ve had an account for a while then you’ve likely got it. Summarily, motion charts allow you to see statistics trends in video so that you can actually see the trending in action. It’s a pretty cool feature and you can learn more about it at the Google Analytics Blog.

There are also two other features that are in beta: Custom Reporting and Advanced Segments.

With custom reports you can define the statistics that are important to you. If you run multiple PPC campaigns and use a landing page for both PPC and organic search then you can use custom reporting to segment your statistics and break it down even into geographic targeting. There is no real limit to what you can do with custom reporting.

Advanced Segments is a feature that allows you to group certain types of visits together. For instance, visits where a site visitor stars a conversion process then backs out could be grouped together in one segment. This allows you to break down your marketing to individual and more specialized segments. Again, there is no limit to how you can use this feature for your website.

If you are not using Google Analytics then I highly recommend that you start today.

Premium WordPress Themes – Is Your Website

The Google Webmaster Central blog paints a vivid picture of an innocent website that gets mixed up in bad company and becomes the carrier of malicious malware. Could that happen to you?

Sure. I think it could, and if you don’t take precautionary measures it just might. Here’s a little snippet of what Google had to say:

The good news is that your grandmother is still kind and loves turtles. She isn’t trying to start a botnet or steal credit card numbers. The bad news is that her website or the server that it runs on probably has a security vulnerability, most likely from some out-of-date software. That vulnerability has been exploited and malicious code has been added to your grandmother’s website. It’s most likely an invisible script or iframe that pulls content from another website that tries to attack any computer that views the page. If the attack succeeds, then viruses, spyware, key loggers, botnets, and other nasty stuff will get installed.

That’s pretty gruesome. Your grandmother is a sweet old lady who wouldn’t harm a fly. Everyone knows that. And when your best friend Bob’s grandmother lands on your grandmother’s cooking website, well, things can get really nasty, and I’m not talking about bread dough falling flat. Is there protection for your grandmother? What can a webmaster do to prevent this type of hack from taking place on their site?

First, make sure that you don’t “hang out” in bad neighborhoods. Research the server that your site is located on and try to find out what other kinds of sites are on it. If possible, get a dedicated server, which is a server that your site and your site alone sits on. It’s more expensive, but you won’t have to worry about bad guys in your neck of the woods.

CMS systems are particularly vulnerable to attacks. They are easily hacked unless you go through the trouble to secure them properly. Make sure that you do. Better yet, code your site in HTML and CSS, if possible. Coded sites are less vulnerable to hacks.

You can also request a malware review of your website from Google. It’s best to do that if you think you may have been hacked or if you have just cleaned up your site and you want to be sure you got it all.

From time to time you probably want to search out your own sites on Google and see if you get the message “This site may harm your computer” associated with it. When you log into your Google Webmaster Tools account you should get a notification from Google that your site has been flagged. If you see one of those then it’s time to take action. Google will not give you advance warning so you need to take action as soon as you see the message. You will lose traffic if you don’t clean it up because if you’re seeing the message then it is appearing in the Google SERPs when people search for information that you provide.

If your website has ever been taken off line due to malicious malware issues then you know it can be frustrating. “But I didn’t put any malware into my site,” you say. Maybe you didn’t, but someone did. s for your business, magazine etc.

Malicious malware is not only bad for your site visitors, but it’s also bad for your website. If you get so many reports over a 90-day period, Google will take your site off line and issue a big red warning sign to visitors telling them that your website may harm their computers (forget about search engine optimization issues, it provides a horrible user experience). It could end up costing you traffic as some of those visitors may never come your way again. It’s a danger of the Web. A real danger.

But how do you combat distributors of malicious malware who would use your website as a distribution channel?

For starters, you need to strengthen your passwords, both your web hosting password and your blog software or CMS password. HTML sites can be affected too, but usually not as often as CMSs and blog platforms. In that case, you’ll want to secure some of your folders and make sure that you have a level of security that is appropriate for the folder.

Most malware and malicious links are inserted into a website’s code because the website owner made it easy for them to gain access. Strengthening your passwords will take care of most issues – probably about 70%-80%. But you’ll also want to make sure that you keep your software upgraded to the latest version. If you are using WordPress, for instance, the most recent version is 2.8.3, issued just a few days ago. Older versions of software usually have security loopholes and the older your software the is the more likely that hackers will be able to find those security loopholes.

Finally, make sure you have a strong spam blocker. The stronger the better. Akismet is considered the best of breed and catches about 90% of spam that is targeted toward a website.

If you do those three things, it may not make completely impervious to malware attacks, but it will go a long way to making sure your visitors – and your website – are safe.

Premium WordPress Themes – Giving Them Direction

Did you know you can direct robots to crawl certain pages on your website or to avoid certain pages altogether? It’s true.You can talk to the search engine robots directly from a document called robots.txt. This can drastically help you with your search engine optimization efforts.

It’s easy to create a robots.txt document. You can do it any text editor such as Notepad or Apple TextEdit. Generally, one robots.txt file can be used for your entire site, however, if you have secure pages on your website then you’ll have to have a separate one for those areas. Upload the file to the root directory on your server and from there it will control your own site.

So what should go into your robots.txt file? Any instructions to search engine spiders that tell them which pages you don’t want crawled or, in some cases, which pages you do. You can make your instructions for all robots or for specific search engine spiders.

Premium WordPress Themes – With A Strong Password

If you are creating your site using an open source solution like WordPress, Joomla, Pligg, or Drupal then you’ll need to make sure that you keep it safe from hackers. Hackers like to solve password puzzles and gain access to places they aren’t welcome. If you use a simple password that is easy to guess then you make yourself vulnerable to hackers and other malicious people.

So how do you make your passwords harder to guess? Here are a few tips:

• Make them long – Short passwords are easy to guess. Make your passwords longer.
• Don’t use dictionary words – Some robots will go through the dictionary and create a list of potential passwords from real words. They can be programmed to enter passwords while their human users sleep. If you use a simple dictionary word as a password then you could be opening yourself up to a hacking attempt.
• Use numbers and special symbols – In addition to being long, you should add numbers and special characters to your passwords. Some companies require their employees to use two numbers and two special characters in their passwords to gain access to the company intranet and other secure areas. You might institute a similar policy at your company.
• Use lower case and upper case letters – Another way to add security to your passwords is to use lower case and upper case lettering. Using only lower case letters makes you more vulnerable. Again, some companies make this a requirement for their employees.
• Don’t just use the obvious characters – The characters above the numbers on your keyboard are obvious choices. What are not obvious are other special characters like the symbols and the copyright symbol.

The longer your password and the more different types of characters you use in your password, the more secure your password. Here are a few examples of bad passwords and how you can make them better.

• Bad = peter / Better = P3e*e”R9t1
• Bad = 123456789 / Better = 1a2$3B45u6:;7C89*
• Bad = meandyou1 / Better = m6e&Y1o0^u=U7s5

You want your password to be easy for you to remember but difficult to guess for a hacker or robot. If you keep that principle in mind then you’ll do well. Stay away from using important dates and names like your birthdate, anniversary, children’s baptism dates, and names of firstborns.