How to Track Your Website’s Traffic

As long as you have a website, you should be tracking the traffic your website gets – for many reasons. Knowing these details can help boost traffic, future growth and can save a massive amount of time by knowing which websites you should be advertising on, partnering with or commenting on blogs or forums. You need to know how visitors got to your site:

Referring Sites

Knowing about other sites who refer traffic to you is vital to your website, it tells you who is helping you and who is not. Use these numbers to see which sites you should be putting more effort into. If you’re putting minimal effort into a site that gives you a good amount of traffic, then you may benefit more from putting forth more effort into that site and maximize your input:output ratio. On the other hand, if you’re spending a lot of time on a site that gives you little or no traffic, you will see it’s most likely a waste of your time and effort.

Direct Traffic

Your direct traffic is also good to know, but not as important as referring site data. Most direct traffic visits are from visitors who know your website address or have bookmarked it. This is good to monitor to see if your direct traffic increases. It is very good to have high direct traffic numbers, which means the visitors are coming straight to you repeatedly, instead of happening to find you on the internet.

Keywords

When people search on internet the words they type in the search box are called keywords. Keyword statistics will tell you which keywords got visitors to click on, which brought them to your website. This data is also useful by seeing which pages were landed on most often, you will know

which pages/posts are more in demand and you can change keywords on less visited pages to potentially get more page visits.

Search Engines

Knowing which search engines refer you the most traffic is important because each search engine has a different algorithm. Your website may come up higher in rankings in one search engine over another. Most businesses should primarily concentrate on Google traffic, However; it may depend on the type of business and location. Seattle area businesses should also target Bing because Microsoft is located here and a mass of customers work here, which they primarily use Bing for web searches.

There are also many other helpful tracking statistics, such as visitors geographic location, what browser viewers are using, how long they stay on your website, what pages they visit, what page they leave from, how many returning visitors you get and many more. All of these tracking details ultimately mesh together and tell you how many unique visits, returning visits and hits your website gets. Each tracking platform calculates differently and has different tracking options. The list below will highlight some different tracking tools so you can decide what would work best for you and your website.

Google Analytics

Analytics is the tool of all tools. This tool requires code insertion on all pages of your website that you want tracked. Nearly all sitebuilder platforms and WordPress websites have a place to plugin your tracking code, which makes it very fast and easy to get going. With this script you may potentially lose valuable data from visitors who may have certain codes disabled, have high security settings or may be on a mobile device that does not support a code. However, Analytics has so many statistics I could write an entire blog post on just that. If you want a stat, most likely Google Analytics has it. I love that Analytics is also visually pleasing for the eye. Not only do they have charts and graphs of all kinds, but they have a unique ‘page layout’ view that adds a transparent layer over your website showing you the percentages of clicks on your page links, so you can physically see where the clicks are, rather than seeing them in chart form (in reporting only, not the live website).

Ovaleye’s Web Hosting Stats

When you have a website hosted with Ovaleye, you also get complimentary real-time logfile analyzer to get advanced statistics. Ovaleye uses the AWStats Platform which is an extraordinary tool that requires no website verification or code insertion. Included in the webstats are helpful tools such as: visits, unique visits, hits, day of week visits, traffic rush hours, most viewed pages, entry and exit pages, and on and on. This tool is very useful and can be used by a website owner on any knowledge level. These statistics are very useful alone, or by comparing the data to Google’s data. Web server statistics are different than Google stats in a few ways; Some visitors may have certain code languages disabled, have high security settings or may be on a mobile device that does not support a code, in which the Google tool may not be able to track data. The downside is that web server stats also include administrative website logins and bot visits, which are not technically true visits. The most accurate results would be numbers somewhere in between web server and code/script tracking data.

Google’s Webmaster Tools

This is another great tool that is simple to use and does require site verification, but not code installation. Webmaster Tools provides less data than the Ovaleye statistics, but is very useful. A few of the features I like are downloadable spreadsheets of links to and from your website, Google data such as pagerank and ability to submit your sitemap to Google; Diagnostics such as page errors, URL’s not followed and timeouts. There are also advanced settings you can configure to specify crawl rate, preferred domain name appearance, and more. This data is strictly how Google views your website, which is the most widely used search engine, but if you prefer another search engine perhaps you would prefer another tracking tool.

Between all of these tools, there is most likely one that will suit your needs best. On some of my websites I prefer comparing Ovaleye’s stats with Google Analytics and figuring my actual numbers are somewhere in between the two, whereas on some of my other websites I just use Ovaleye’s tools.

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Top effective Social Marketing Resources

1. Google Friend Connect

2. Facebook

3. MySpace

4. hi5

5. LinkedIn

6. Tagged

7. Ning

B. Blog Applications & Sites

1. Yahoo! Shortcuts

2. Blogger

3. WordPress

4. Kindle Publishing

5. TypePad

6. Wordpress for iPhone

7. Technorati

C. Bookmarking Applications & Sites

1. Digg

2. Stumbleupon

3. AddThis!

4. bit.ly

5. Delicious

6. diigo

7. Jumptags

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Best Places to List (and Promote) Your Blog

The Top Blog Search Engines

Technorati: Billed as the worlds largest, Technorati rates your blog based on a number of criteria, and gives you an authority ranking – on a scale of 1-1000. Post useful, well read and commented blog posts and you'll grow. Can be a challenge to get listed, but it's worth it.

Klout: Specifically for Twitter, Klout measures a huge range of criteria, and creates a Klout Score to measure your influence via your witter account. Worth listing, as it takes just a few minutes and helps create credibility of your microblog.

IceRocket: IceRocket began as a blog search engine and now also searches other social networks such as Twitter, MySpace and the Web. This is one to keep an eye on.

BlogCatalog: BlogCatalog is a combination social community and blog search engine. With your free account, you can interact with other bloggers, find blogs and promote your own. Simple to use, and fast turnaround for blog listings.

BlogPulse: BlogPulse offers an impressive array of features, including an automated trending tool for blogs. Definitely worth checking out.

Alltop: This popular tool (by internet celebrity Guy Kawasaki) is easy to submit to, however getting listed can be a little tougher. The one page submission form allows you to request which section to be listed on, and both your URL and RSS feed. Within a week, they'll advise of acceptance or refusal. If accepted, your blog is opened to a huge audience. Alltop is a combination blog search engine and blog/headline aggregator. Its popular and works better than you might think.

The Worst 3 Blog Search Engines - The Ones You Need to Avoid

Blogarama: Blogarama is a basic search engine for blogs. It doesn’t include the quality ranking of Technorati or Blogcatalog. 

Bloggernity: A combination directory and search engine for blogs, Bloggernity is a relative newcomer in the field, and it shows.

Bloggapedia: Bloggapedia is a basic blog search engine, that seems to have elements for a social network, but is dysfunctional and unused. Seems moderately popular as a search engine.

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Steps to Easily Increase Traffic to Your Blog

Hootsuite and TweetAdder are just two of the great Twitter tools available.
Automated blog promotion is not as complicated as it might sound. Following these five simple steps can quickly increase traffic to your blog. And once its setup – it won't take any time or cost any money.
Here's what happens: Every time you post a new blog, your RSS feed picks up the new content. It then automatically creates a tweet about it, and sends it out through HootSuite. And the traffic is measured and tracked.
If you have only a small following on Twitter, you may consider using a tool like TweetAdder to build your following.

Difficulty: Easy

Time Required: 10 Minutes

Here's How:

1. Setup a free account with HootSuite.

   Visit Hootsuite.com. Click on "Sign Up Now" and fill out the basic signup form.
   

2. Add your Twitter account to your Hootsuite account

   Click on the Dashboard button. Then click on Settings, Social Networks, and finally Add Social Network. Choose Twitter, then Connect with Twitter. This links your Hootsuite and Twitter accounts.
   

3. Find the RSS feed of your blog.

   RSS Feed is a link of published content from your blog. How to find an RSS feed. Once you find it, select it and copy it (Ctrl+C) to the clipboard.
   

4. Link your RSS blog feed to your twitter account

   Under your Hootsuite Dashboard, click on Settings, then RSS / Atom Feeds, and finally Add New Feed.
   A very simple form comes up. You'll want to paste (Ctrl+P) the RSS feed into the box: Feed URL The next settings are personal preference. If you post to your blog more than once per day, then you may want to make it check frequently, maybe every hour.
   

5. Customize Your Auto-Tweets

   In the "When new posts are found, tweet up to" option, it's most effective to post one at a time.
   In the final option, it may also be useful to add some "Prepend Text" which introduces the content. Something simple like "New Blog Post" will differentiate this tweet from your other tweets.
   Choose which profile to send from.
   And click "Save Feed". And that’s it. The next time you post your blog, you'll also automatically tweet about it.
   

Tips:

1. You can also use this tool to update your Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, Wordpress, MySpace and Foursquare social networks with the same information.
2. Interested in how many people have visited your blog through your Twitter account? Inside of Hootsuite, click on the Dashboard button (currently the Owl's head, in the top left corner). Then click on Stats, then Summary. This will show you an analytics of your tweets and clicks.
3. Need more followers? Try TweetAdder. It will build a targeted and responsive following. Read the review or try a free trial. Vendors Site

What You Need

• A Blog
• A Twitter Account
• 10 Minutes

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Successful Link Building Tips for Internet Business

 If you were to ask an expert internet marketer where they get all their traffic that seems ready to buy the moment they get there, they'd tell you that they rely on the search engines. If you hope to beat out all the other sites on the engines, then you'd better work at getting one way backlinks from relevant sites so that the search engines will favor you. Link building must be done if you ever hope to rank high for the keywords you've chosen. Getting loads of backlinks isn't hard if you just follow the tips you're about to read about.

You should concentrate on building high quality backlinks, but this doesn't have to be hard and inconvenient. Yes, you will be able to create backlinks when you comment on other blogs that are in your niche. You probably think that making these comments will take too much time. Quite frankly, this is where you have to start making some great decisions. You have the chance to put your name and link in your blog comments.When you leave a comment on a blog, it can include your link and name. However, it is important how you make your comments and on which blog you put them. First, make comments on blogs that have the same topics as yours because this should get the readers that are interested in the same topics.

Second, you should be certain that the blog has a high page rank because making comments on this type of blog will provide great backlinks that will be beneficial in more ways than one. Third, stay away from blogs that have a "no follow" tag. Simply put, you want the search engines to count your backlinks as a credible one. You can find tools on the internet that will help ascertain if a blog is a "no follow" blog. Finally, only insert your product name in your anchor text when you make blog comments, and not your personal name. Once you start practicing this process, you will see that it has many qualities. So, go on and try it out.

You have to remember that your backlinking strategy is better when you have original links and you are ethical about the process. One good way to get backlinks to your website is to use Squidoo or HubPages. These are revenue sharing sites that let you write your own information articles and share them with your specified audience. The plus point with them is that they allow you to post links in anchor text, which makes them a valid candidate for your link building venture. Don't exploit these sites by doing illegal things, but instead utilize them as a part of your link building success. Search engines will view your backlinks as credible since they came from Squidoo and Hubpages, which have a lot of authority. This also means that the pages you create on these sites will have a good ranking be able to boost your own website for your specific keyword.

What if you discovered a way to get a load of backlinks that was idiot proof? This is of course discussing building links via forums and other discussion sites. Most forums allow you to put your link in your signature box. You'll want to comment as much as possible so as to build a following, where they'll always know what link to click. This will put more eyeballs on your site in the form of the other members, but you'll also garner that backlink, which will help you in the search engine rankings. Last but not the least; make sure you're posting your links only on relevant forums that are related to your niche, so that you have the best chances to rank for your chosen keyword.

In conclusion, these are simple but productive tips. Implement them now for good results.

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How to select Domain Name

Setting up a business website is considered as a very important part of present day advertisement. The first and the foremost thing to be done is to select a suitable domain name for the website as this will be the face of the whole business.

A domain name is nothing but the web address that your business will have. When chosen thoughtfully, a successful name will ensure quality advertisement and popularity for the business. The registration of a domain name and website hosting automatically gets the business listed into directories guiding web traffic, different forums and portals, into the search engine rank system and so on.

One can not just blindly choose a domain name as lot of company’s reputation depends on it. Following are some very important tips, necessary guidelines to be kept in mind while purchasing a successful domain name for your business website.

• Availability: You would have definitely thought of a name that suits your business and will represent it appropriately. But to acquire this name you need to check if it’s available or has already been taken by someone else. To do this you can take the help of tools facilitated by the domain name registration sites(e.g. Godaddy.com etc) and check your desired name’s availability.
  
  Many common names like diet, food, business, travel have already been taken and vastly in use. In case the name you have chosen is already in use, the tool will provide you with suggestions that help you to make changes. It is a good practice to check even US trademark database as you don’t want to face problems later on. Do make it a point that even if some one used a particular name earlier and now you have bought it, it was not used for any illegal purpose. It’s always better to be safe than sorry.
• Selection: The name that you choose for your website has to be relevant to your business, appropriately represent it and build identity. You might go in with the company or brand name itself in case the business already exists. Popular websites like eBay.com have carried over their brand names. In case of business being new and domain name is going to play a part in building the reputation, then you experiment. Use keywords that represent your business, bring uniqueness and make it catchy. When the keyword is placed at the beginning of the domain name, it works much better with search engines. Do not make the mistake of reusing the same word in domain name as it just adds to the confusion.
• Short and sweet: It is not always necessary to have big or long names to make your business successful. Crisp, catchy, relevant and business minded domain names are always a hit. The most important thing about the name is that it has to be easy to remember and to be printed. Short names will also avoid any spelling mistakes and do no consume lot of space when printed on products. The ideal size of a domain name is 10 characters. Its not easy finding this size though, given the fact that many names have be taken, registered, and sold again and so on. Do not go in for short forms of names because it normally works with company names that are already in use not for businesses that are budding.
• Prefix and suffix: The domain name is not alone by itself. Usually a “www” will be prefixed to the domain name and then suffix of “.com” will follow. The general notion in the customer’s mind is that most businesses have .com as suffix. You can choose to experiment with it and use .net, .info, .net, .org etc instead. Though it takes time for people to get used to it, the advantage is that you can take an already existing domain name and just replace .com with any others mentioned above. The one thing to be kept in mind is that you need to look for the most relevant name rather than the popular ones because little mistakes might just take the traffic away from your website.
• Easy to remember: Most of us have passwords made of numbers, letters and characters which make them unique. But using the same formula for domain names is not a good idea. You don’t wish that the customers forget the domain name the very next moment that they heard. Opting to use random names, miss spelt words and acronyms for businesses that are yet to be established is a bad idea. When such domain names are advertised on radio or live shows, people are mostly to forget them.
  
  First thing is that the name should be easy to recite or pronounce. This way it puts the first print on both advertiser and the audiences’ mind. Then follows its uniqueness that is the relevance to the business that it represents like ezinearticles.com, which is all about articles.
  
  Last it has to be easy to be remembered and recalled at any time. Avoid having words that can be spelt many ways but pronounced same like two, too, to or sea, see and so on. Avoid dashes(-) too in your domain name as people generally don’t remember the dashes in domain names.

Some handy tips:

1. The keyword has to be what your business is all about. For example, if you are marketing gardening tools, this is your keyword. This also helps you get visitors who are specifically looking for what you are marketing.
2. Many a times when you find that the desired domain is already registered, try adding an action word at the end, for example, gardentoolsinfo. Some other commonly used words are sale, shop, deals etc. you can even put a few numbers that have some significance like the day this company was started or even your birth date. This way you will be able to gain uniqueness and also get the desired domain name.
3. Play a trick by using very common search keywords like news, image, video etc. This automatically matches your site name with more searches and visitors than it would otherwise. This helps your ranking in a great way.
4. Stick to using popular top level domain(TLD) like .com, .net and so on. You might be tempted to use something like .tv but that will only drive your customers away because it has nothing to do with your business. It is better to make alterations in name rather than in domain TLD. There are plenty of sites that will help you to acquire a reasonable name with the help of the keywords that you provide.
5. Using hyphens was a trend a few years ago but now it’s a big no. This is mainly because it affects your ranking in the search engines.
6. Take help of your friends, associates and clients to finalize on your domain name. This will also help you to understand what they think of your business and in turn build its identity.
7. Do not waste any time once you have decided on the name and got its availability. Immediately register it so that no one should take away the name before you do. Registering names is happening at lightening speed and you should not left behind.
8. Keep a check on how much you agree to pay as domain names are not as expensive as they used to be. Collect information and do a survey in your circle as to what is a reasonable price to pay and do not get fooled by paying more than you really should. You should not pay more then $10 to $20 for a year of domain name registration.
9. Some common don’ts in selecting a domain names are: using words that are not relevant to your business, repeating the keywords and using more than 2 keywords.
10. Setting up a domain name is a big task in itself. But that’s not the end of it; in fact it’s a beginning of many things to follow. People will come to know about your website only when you advertise it. Some great ways to market your domain name and thus advertising your business are as following: run ads on forums, discussions, newsletters etc.
    
    Use it as a part of your signature whenever you send an email or write a blog or comment in forums. According to the traffic on your website, the popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing will update your domain name in their ranking. Apart from this you can print it on anything that your business is related to like your business card, products, ads in news papers and magazines and so on.
    
    By understanding the importance of a domain name you will also know the kind of impact it will have on your business. It is much more than just a name, thus it has to be selected tactically keeping in mind all the above mentioned points. One should remember that after a domain name is registered it automatically becomes a part of search engines and forums. In case any change is to done later, you might have to suffer a great amount of loss. Do not make haste but do it in time to boost your business to great levels.

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How to select Web Hosting

Web hosting is a great business idea provided you have a clear idea of how it works and how you can benefit from it. This article is aimed at giving you detailed information about web hosting and what are the important factors to be kept in mind while venturing into this field.

What is Web Hosting?
First of all one has to know what exactly is meant by web hosting. When websites are created, the relevant information has to be stored online. This should be very easily accessible to visitors from around the world. The business of providing space and bandwidth to many website at a time all the while is called web hosting. This is managed by a very powerful and immensely fast computer server which in turn runs on the internet.

What it does is that no matter how many or from where the visitors are trying to access your website, it makes all the information present on your website available. If this is taken as the virtual existence of web hosts, they exist in reality as well at a data center where they would have set up their powerful computers and manage the show with the help of trained staff.

How does it Work?
The companies that are into web hosting will provide specific amount of space and bandwidth to a website for a monthly rental or charges. When this space is acquired, the website is permitted to upload varied information related to their business in the form of files. This information will be saved on the server space and visitors from across the globe can access this information through the internet.

Some people might opt to run their own server but this would prove to be much expensive compared to what the web hosting companies would charge on a monthly basis. The web hosting companies will take care of all the technical as well as hardware and software side of the whole business and in turn websites create business space for such companies.

Different Kinds of Web Hosting:

You will come across many kinds of web hosting in the market. The major ones in practice are dedicated, shared and reseller. These are established to meet specific needs of the customers.

Dedicated: when a big website wants to go in for a safe and economical web hosting, dedicated is their choice. This will save them from spending thousands of dollars on renting huge space on different servers on a monthly basis. They can have a server of their own where no one will be sharing the space and this means your website will work very fast.

Shared: This is a very popular web hosting type. There are many web hosting companies who will provide you specific amount of bandwidth and space for your website at great speed. A powerful server will be shared by many websites and a particular web hosting company will have many such servers being managed at their data center. According to the capacity of the server, the space will be distributed among websites depending on their requirement. If your website is not that large and do not expect more than couple of thousands of visitors on day to day basis then this kind of web hosting is perfect for you. This way you get the speed, space and at a very affordable price as well.

Reseller: Do you wish to start a web hosting business of your own? You can start off with this kind of inexpensive option. In this case you purchase reseller hosting space plans from big hosting companies and divide that web space and sell it to individuals who want to host their website. Server is maintained by the parent hosting company and you just need to sell the hosting space to people.
You pay monthly or yearly fees to reseller hosting company i.e. the parent company and the fees you collect from people is all yours.

Factors to Consider While Buying Web Hosting:

 Now that you got a fair idea of how web hosting works, lets learn more about factors which will help you buy the most suitable and economical service.

1. Price: the first thing to be considered is how much a web hosting company is charging you for the service they provide. You will find many offers which will really be light on your pocket, but do not be taken away by them unless you check out other criteria. Look for a web host who includes quality service at a reasonable price because if you compromise on space or speed, then your website will be directly hit.
2. Space: The space provided by the web host to store your files is called as disk space. Depending on the size of your files and information you can go for different plans offered by the hosts. It is always safe to have a bit more space than required as this allows you to freely make alterations to your websites when needed. 
3. Bandwidth: a good web host will allot you good amount of bandwidth because it determines the quantity of the visitors that are directed towards you. Some web hosts might just trick you by saying they are offering unlimited bandwidth, but in reality they would just be juggling with websites. May of these might end up being illegal. 
4. Safety and Support: A good web host will back you up with round the clock customer support and safety. They actually provide their services on a trial basis and in case of any dissatisfaction; they would return the money you have invested. 
5. Control Panel: you get to be in contact with the web host through a standard control panel. For easy access and constant use, the panel has to simple yet efficient. These are some good options for you to choose from. Do try a few before picking the one that suits best. We recommend you to use Cpanel control panel as its easy and comes with loads of features.
6. The OS: the operating system plays a major role in how your whole web hosting is managed. Linux is a favored OS compared to Windows mainly because of its stability. Before buying space, make sure all the requirements of your website are met by the OS of the host. 
7. Perks: there are a few things which might not fall into bare essentials but are necessary to run your website successfully. First thing to check is the uptime proposed by the web host. You will never have a round the clock availability simply because of one or the other issues with maintenance. Also pay attention to the numbers of email ID and storage space they are willing to provide for your emails. This has to be pretty big whether you need it or not. A good web host will gather all the information regarding visits per day, duration, location, frequency and so on. This information is a great asset to web owners as they can improvise their business based on the results.
   You should also be able to transfer files using FTP without any hassle as this is a part of your deal with the web host. If your website is a more complicated one, you sure would want to check the scripts offered by the host. Also to your access should be the database from where large amount of information can be borrowed for your purpose.
   Do make it a point to go through the terms and conditions of the web hosting company before you finalize on one. Do not miss to check their set up charges, additional charges, hidden charges (if any) and what is the length of the contract. Once you find that things are up to your expectation and you are ready to buy space in web hosting, go ahead and purchase it. You will very soon see the fruits of the all the trouble you took to find a good web host.

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SEO- A Technique to increase Your Website Ranking

A website is a great way to advertise your business over the internet and you would want to reach more and more people through it. Once you start getting familiarized with the ways websites work, you will come across a term SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Do not be afraid of this term or develop fear of how to make it work. As you read on, you will learn about the term as well as tips and tricks to make your website more successful.

What is SEO?

This is a simple technique adopted to make your website or page or articles more welcoming towards the search engines. Some popular Search Engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing.
You would put data or information that search engines normally look for while ranking a website. Once the data is recognized by the search engines, your ranking will automatically move upwards. If you are wondering what is the use of moving up in raking then you need to really know all the details about SEO. Once a website is ranked higher, it will be displayed in the top pages of the search engines. When visitors start looking for particular information, they will come across your website before others and this way the traffic is directed towards you automatically. This is a natural process and if you are unable to do necessary changes in website to be SEO friendly, then there are many experts who will be happy to lend you a helping hand.

It is a fact that you would require some practice and time to get a grip of this technique. For your assistance there are many articles, eBooks and so on present on the web. Once you start reading through the information, you will become more comfortable with the concept. Let’s take an example to elaborate it. When you are looking for any information, you log into a search site and type relevant words. Then the page will give a list of websites that can be of use to you. Your first instinct will be to click on the links that are right at the top. This is what exactly the SEO technique does to your website by ranking it higher.

The two major parts involved in making your website SEO friendly are On-Page and Off-Page. Let’s understand these terms.

On Page Optimization:

Your website will have a home page which contains lot of information. When you make changes according to the SEO requirement, it is known as on page change. These alterations can be of different type like title tags, Meta, Alt and so on. The whole purpose is to insert the major keywords of your business into the page so that when visitors type these words, they are directed towards you. One has to be very careful in designing this content as it needs to impress the visitors. Only when they are satisfied and visit again and again, your website will gain recognition.

It is important to observe visitors’ activity and if they are bouncing off your website, then analyze the reason and fix it. Their might be some part of the page or graphic or information that is disturbing the visitors and in turn forcing then to move away from your website. If this prolongs, it will prove to be very harmful for your business.

Off Page Optimization:

Apart from making desirable changes in your home page, you can adopt some other techniques that will boost your ranking. Off page activities include creating back links from good external websites, promoting your site in social network sites and so on. These will indirectly promote your website and direct a good amount of traffic towards it. It is not an easy task to do this as you would be paying for it and you have to make the best use of it.

Following are some other important tips that you must utilize for an effective SEO .
Do not try them out in a hurry as they are technical things and need quite a lot of attention. You also need to remember that what decisions you take will either make or break the reputation of your website and in turn your business.

Registering at Google Web Master Tools- Google is where you will find this tool called as web masters. Here your page or website will be checked according to SEO requirements and when and if any mistakes are spotted, Google will notify you. This makes it that much more easy for you to improve your website.

Google Maps- One of the easiest and best things you can do to boost ranking is to get your business listed in Google maps using Google Local Business Center. This way people who are looking for information will know your location. It makes it that much easier for people to reach your website and take a tour of it.

Read More- The web is full of suggestions by experts in this field. You can read and learn more about how SEO works for free. You will come across many forums and discussion portals where you can ask questions to experts and get valuable answers from them. Spend quality time on it as it’s worth it.

Start Writing- Blogs are a great to promote your website. You can start writing about your business, its website, products, specialty and so on to create interest in viewers. The one work of caution would be to keep it to business and not really pose a personal picture. The main purpose of this should be to make your business known to as many people are possible. Do not forget to use your web address with your signature.

There are different marketing strategies and this is one of them. SEO is a very powerful technique when used properly. It is like making your website popular by adding data that is suitable for the search engines. With this simple yet very effective technique you can get your website to really high rankings and boost your visitors’ traffic like you have never imagined.

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Top Free Tools for Testing Website Speed for web designers

Your Website speed should not  be undetermined , particularly it has a big impact on SEO. To get out of this, we have made a collection of free website speed testing tools to test you website speed. These tools will help you to optimize your website and make some suggestion to increase your website speed by reducing the website load, so let’s start your website testing by these tools so that you can get the best solutions.

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Online analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster.

Load Impact

Load test your website online, we offer load testing and reporting as an online service to e-commerce & B2B sites all over the world.

Neustar Web Performance

A quick and easy way to get performance data on any website without having to create a test script.

WebPagetest

Run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds. You can run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more.

OctaGate SiteTimer

pingdom

Which Loads Faster

Pages compete head-to-head in your browser to see who’s fastest!

Show Slow

Show Slow is an open source tool that helps monitor various website performance metrics over time. It captures the results of YSlow, Page Speed, WebPageTest and dynaTrace AJAX Edition rankings and graphs them, to help you understand how various changes to your site affect its performance.

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Top Online Tools for Website Validation and Testing

1.W3C markup validation service

This validator checks the markup validity  of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc. This is an exclusive standards check for the document, so other checks are not available.

Checks done on:

1. Syntax and style analysis – Yes
2. Source code – Yes

2.CSS validator

Check Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and (X)HTML documents with style sheets.The important thing is if you want to validate your CSS style sheet embedded in an (X)HTML document, you should first check that the (X)HTML you use is valid.

3.Checklink

Check links and anchors in Web pages or full Web sites.This Link Checker looks for issues in links, anchors and referenced objects in a Web page, CSS style sheet, or recursively on a whole Web site. For best results, it is recommended to first ensure that the documents checked use Valid (X)HTML Markup and CSS.

4.Feed

This is the W3C Feed Validation Service, a free service that checks the syntax of Atom or RSS feeds.You can validate by URL or Validate by direct input.

5.Mobile checker

This checker performs various tests on a Web Page to determine its level of mobile-friendliness. The tests are defined in the mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 specification. A Web Page is mobileOK when it passes all the tests. And find Is your Web site mobile-friendly?

6.Unicorn

Checks your site for all the general standards and see if there are rooms to improvement. It checks for the XHTML and CSS compatibility.

7.HTML Validator

The WDG HTML Validator is similar in many ways to the W3C HTML Validation Service. Most of the previous differences between the two validators have disappeared with recent development of the W3C validator. The errors reported are the same in virtually all cases.

8.Dr. Watson’s site validation check

Dr. Watson is a free service to analyze your web page on the Internet. Just give the URL of your page and Watson will get a copy of it directly from the web server. Watson can also check out many other aspects of your site, including link validity, download speed, search engine compatibility, and link popularity. It rolls many features into one, so if you are looking for a single stop for checks, this one is the place to be.

List of checks :

1. Page load time check – Yes
2. Syntax and style analysis – Yes
3. Word counts – Yes
4. Spelling checks – Yes
5. Link checking – Yes
6. Search Engine Optimization check – Yes
7. Incoming links check – Yes
8. Source code – Yes

9.XML well checker and validator

Use this form to check an XML document for well-formetness and (optionally) validity. External entity references are included, even when not validating.It checks for spaces and syntax errors, while pointing to the line number at which the error was spotted.

10.Robots checker

This tool checks if your Robots.txt file is valid. Thought it may show some exclusions you’ve done as errors, they are good pointers to check if the commands will be misinterpreted or not. Good one and it is simple,powerful and accurate one.

11.URL checker

While it’s important to know if your website is running and your host is providing a good service, it’s even more important to be proactive about getting it back online fast so you don’t lose search engine position, miss out on possible revenue or blow.InternetSupervision™ is a service that monitors the availability of HTML, FTP, SMTP, POP3 email servers), supervises the performance of website and e-commerce transactions (including website forms) and provides website content supervision (cyber-attack monitoring).

11.1.Web page reports

There are various online services offering automated web page checks. pinkjuice.com/check is just a simple tool generating links to the report pages of some of those services, including emulators, validators, and accessibility checkers.And it’s handy to have a list of all the results pages, for example when sending a status report to a client about a website that’s being worked on.

Accessibility and evaluation tools

12.Webaccessibility checker

This tool checks single HTML pages for conformance with accessibility standards to ensure the content can be accessed by everyone. See the Handbook link to the upper right for more about the Web Accessibility Checker.

13.Color contrast

AccessColor tests the color contrast and color brightness between the foreground and background of all elements in the DOM to make sure that the contrast is high enough for people with visual impairments. AccessColor will find the relevant color combination within your HTML and CSS documents rather than requiring you to find each value to input yourself in order to test the contrast between each color combination.

14.Web accessibily evaluation tool-WAVE

WAVE is a free web accessibility evaluation tool provided by WebAIM. It is used to aid humans in the web accessibility evaluation process. Rather than providing a complex technical report, WAVE shows the original web page with embedded icons and indicators that reveal the accessibility of that page.

15.FAE – Functional Accessibility Evaluator

Use this tool to evaluate the functional accessibility of a single web page. It evaluate multiple pages via web crawling,Generate a Sitewide Report that identifies problem pages,Save reports in an account-specific Archived Reports list.

16.Accessibility with style

HERA is a tool to check the accessibility of Web pages according to the specification Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. HERA performs a preliminary set of tests on the page and identifies any automatically detectable errors or checkpoints met, and which checkpoints need further manual verification.

17.Section 508

The Section 508 checking tool automatically compares your HTML code against Section 508 checklist and shows your results quickly.  Results are simple to understand too.

18.Adobe PDF conversion

This conversion service will convert to text Adobe PDF files that are in English.By submitting content through these tools, you understand and agree that Adobe may occasionally access the content you submit for purposes of quality control and administration of the conversion service.

Website performance checkers

19.Pingdom tools

The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars.

20.Webpage analyzer

Free web site speed test to improve website performance.The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component. Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time

Cross Browser Testing

21.Browser shots

Browsershots makes screen shots of your web design in different operating systems and browsers. It is a free open-source online web application providing developers a convenient way to test their website’s browser compatibility in one place. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to our central dedicated servers for your review.

22.IE net renderer

IE NetRenderer allows you to check how a website is rendered by Internet Explorer 7, 6 or 5.5, as seen from a high-speed data center located in Germany.

23.Viewlike

viewlike allows you to check out how your website looks in the most popular resolution formats. It’s all powered by Ajax & PHP so no need to download anything! To Get started just type your URL in the box above. Free to use!

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10 Best Free Tools to Check Website Loading Time

Everyone knows how annoying it can be having to deal with websites that take forever to load. As per some recent researches, almost 75% of the Internet users do not return to sites that take longer than four seconds to load. A Fast loading website is the first step to a successful online presence, but you will be surprised how many scripts and widgets may be slowing your site to a crawl.

10 Free Tools to Check the Website Loading Time

1. iWebTool Speed Test
- Simple tool to test your website’s loading time and compare with other websites. great tool for benchmarking. It allows you to enter up to 10 websites, and the results display the size of the website, the total loading time and the average speed per KB.

2. Pingdom Tools
- Pingdom is a popular uptime performance monitoring service for websites and servers. They also host a free load time test for web pages. The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes) and displays the load time of all objects visually with time bars. Also see the statistics like the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.

3. Internet Supervision Webserver Monitoring Tool
- InternetSupervision.com monitors the availability, performance, and content of your website, web server and internet services from across the globe. If you ever wanted to know how much time it takes to load your website from different locations in the world, this is the tool for you.

4. Webslug Loading Time Test
- Webslug measures load time as the user sees it. The time it takes for a page to load fully from when the request was made. The main benefit of Webslug is that it doesn’t require any download or any program to be installed. Just enter your website’s address and it’s all done in your browser.

5. OctaGate Site Timer
- Very similar to Pingdom Tools

6. Site-Perf.com
- Though this looks similar to Pingdom tool, it goes a step further by letting you decide the test server location and Max threads per host value. Very good and very accurate!

7. LinkVendor Website Speed Check

- The website speedtester shows the duration of a given website. This value can be used for showing how long a website take to load and if it is better to optimize the website or change a (slow) ISP.

8. Website Optimization – Web Page analyzer

- The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component. Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time. The script incorporates the latest best practices from Website Optimization Secrets, web page size guidelines and trends, and web site optimization techniques into its recommendations.

9. Uptrends Web Page test tool

- The full page test tool allows you to test the load time and speed of a complete HTML page of your website, including all objects such as images, frames, CSS stylesheets, Flash objects, RSS feeds, and Javascript files. The full HTML page test tool will analyze the page and download all the objects, displaying the corresponding load times, the object sizes, and which objects are missing, including content from third party suppliers such as advertisements. With the full HTML page test tool you will be able to analyze in detail which object slows down your web page, and how to optimize your website. The load time of all objects is visualized with time bars.

10. WebWait

- WebWait is a website timer. You can benchmark your website or test the speed of your web connection. Timing is accurate because WebWait pulls down the entire website into your browser, so it takes into account Ajax/Javascript processing and image loading which other tools ignore.

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