Do you check your website and stats daily? Does your tracking software give you everything you need? Do you know home many people are on your site right now?

Previously, we had 2 choices: Use a log analyzer (or some other analytics package) that we usually hours, if not days, old. Or use something like Prosper 202, or some equivalent to get that info. They cannot all furnish you the vital statistics and data needed to assess your site status and success at any given moment.

When you launch a marketing or advertising campaign, it increases over time and as expected, we hope that a large amount of traffic will make it to your website and ultimately convert. For websites that have a steady stream of traffic how can you monitor the real time users visiting the site? What if your server goes down, will you know about it? Are there any tools which can reliably give you exact real time statistics?

Website owners regularly check their website numbers on regular basis because they want to know how many visitors are browsing their websites. As owners, you want to witness the sources of traffic and what visitors do on your site. You need to periodically analyze where traffic came from and what changes are needed to boost the recent traffic you have. Apart from increasing traffic, it is also vital to identify key trends on your website to know which areas need concentration and enhancement. Most often, when you publish new information or content on your website, you expect to see rise in visitor numbers as this contents is relevant to your users and you hope that the search engines will notice this. For example, if social media is where most of your traffic comes from, then it gives you a clue and an indication of which suitable method to adopt to generate the traffic you want. If this is the case, then you focus your attention on online social media networks like Twitter or Facebook. Apart from source of traffic, you should also assess suitable keywords which generate the traffic.

Is your tracking software powerful enough to give you all of this? Is it providing you the statistics needed to bring you the success of your website? If your answer is a big “NO,” then you are note using the right analytic software to lead you to success. What you need is a powerful, efficient and effective analytics system like Google Analytics (or something similar).

Author’s Note: Google Analytics is not the silver bullet for every website out there. However it is free to use and can help the vast majority of websites and businesses. If you would like us to help you decide, feel free to contact Alon Cohen to see how to improve your online presence.

With Google Analytics, you will see the power of using analytics. By familiarizing and discovering how it works, you can do more with it and you will find more perks which will help you better your website.

What is Google Analytics and what’s so special about it?

It’s free software as a service (SaaS) from Google Inc. aimed at helping website owners understand and boost their traffic and visitor actions. It was originally developed by Urchin Software Corp. which ideas are were from Adaptive Path’s Measure Map and later acquired by. Since its inception, it has helped countless websites in evaluating their analytics, sources of visitors and in achieving their objectives.

If you are new to Google Analytics, you may be asking yourself as how it can help you with your website. Well, Google Analytics can help you in lots of ways. One of its perks is its ability to track website visitors. It has the ability to find out which websites they previously visited and how they ended up visiting your website. Much more, it can track different types of referrers, such as display advertising, search engines, email marketing, pay per click marketing or digital collateral.

If you want to grow you online business, then you really should learn how to use Google Analytics. Remember that visitors come and go and once they go, they rarely leave any comments. This is where the analytics comes in to play, providing you the insight you need to give them a better experience on your site. Even by looking at your top landing and exit pages you can see where to focus.

With the data and statistics gathered, you can improve the quality of your webpages, you can write powerful adverts to strengthen your marketing strategies and you can find suitable keywords that attract potential visitors. Moreover, you can assess different types of advertisements which attract more responses and what effective content is suitable to boost visitor conversions in your landing pages.

With Google Analytics on your side, you can analyze, measure, report, optimize and assess different types of marketing mediums and channels. With it, you can develop series of metrics, benchmarks and goals which will let you see how your marketing strategies are performing in real time. It removes the guessing game or the trial and error strategies because you can exactly pinpoint which areas needs improvement, thereby giving you more time to maximize your profitability and marketing efficiency.

The best part of all, Google Analytics is free to everyone, thus you can benefit from it for as long as you want with the worry of spending millions on marketing and web analytics. More so, this analytics platform is user friendly and scalable, thus it suits to whatever size, type of business that you have. Regardless of how big or small your company is, you are sure that it consistently provides quality and consistent service.

Because of its power, consistency and breadth, it is growing in popularity and dominating the market. By understanding its power, proficiency and efficiency, you can develop customized statistical reports and take your Internet marketing and advertising to a new level.

The newest version of  WordPress was just released. If you have not already done so, make sure your WordPress version is up to date.

Part on Online Marketing (and offline as well) is not only convincing your web site visitors that your product or service is exactly what they need, but also that it is in the same price range they are looking for. It is easy to overlook how customer expectations can influence the outcome of a sale.

During the last 2 years we have seen a dramatic increase in the price of gas, especially during the first half of 2008. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of various reports on how this has affected various industries. People are not buying.

They don’t buy trucks & SUV’s like they used to.
They don’t drive as much as they used to.
They don’t fly as much as they used to.

 
Gas chart by http://www.massachusettsgasprices.com/retail_price_chart.aspx

Now that prices are starting to drop, people are more eager to buy gas for those long, and even shorter, weekend trips. Those same trips that many people put on hold due to the high gas prices earlier this year.

 

As a result there are now these ridiculously long lines at the pump. All the people, that just a couple of months earlier were not so eager to guy/use gas unless they absolutely had to are now filling up. I filled up my tank a few days ago at around 1 PM, thinking that in the middle of the day the line would not be too bad. In the end I had to wait about 10 minutes in line just to fill up the tank of my little Focus.

What does the price of gas have to do with the sales on my website?
When customers come to your site and they see the price they were expecting, or better yet lower ones, they are more likely to open up their wallets & pocketbooks. If you sell a high end product or service, make sure that the online marketing effort that got them to your site and the user experience on your website reflects that high end value want to sell to them.

When you go to a fast food place for lunch you don’t expect the same price and feel of a 5-star restaurant. Imagine going to a McDonalds or Burger King, and paying $50 per person. You would likely take your business elsewhere. Is your website doing the same thing to your potential customers?

A few years ago I started using various anti-spam “solutions”. Outlook junk filter was the big one at the time. As happened to many, I got a few false positives. I originally thought to myself  “OK, I can just check that junk folder a couple of times a day”. That few minutes twice per day quickly turned into a once a week ritual of hell that took more then an hour to wade through all of the junk in that folder. All this just to see if I got any false positives.

I subsequently turned that off and have had all my emails delivered into my inbox since then. That stopped all the false positives and I have not heard of any missed emails since. The problem being that I was spending quite a bit of time deleting junk from my Inbox.

Then I started using Postini anti-spam filtering for my emails. The big difference of how it works, and why I love it, is that once per day Postini sends me a digest with a list of all emails that it blocked. That list contains the time, date, sender and subject of every blocked email.  I can then quickly go through that list and click on any email in that list to either view it in my browser or have it delivered.

What a difference!

I just installed the Twitter Tools Plugin for WordPress. It has some slick features that you can use to semi-automate your Online Marketing. Basically it allows you to synchronize your blog posts and your Twitter Tweets seamlessly. You can set it to:

1. Create a Tweet each time you write a new blog post
2. Create a new blog post for each new Tweet
3. Create a daily digest of your Tweets on your Blog.

It also has some additonal sidebar options that I have not looked into yet.

As an example, I set it here to create a new Tweet every time I write a new post. Now people who follow my Twitter profile (Alon’s Twitter Profile) will be notified when I write a new post, even if they are not subscribed to my RSS feed.

Before going in to how to optimize your site for the various search engines it is important to understand the history of both the internet and the search engines themselves. After all it is easier to both understand and remember the basic rules of S.E.O. and S.E.M. (Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing) if you understand the various theories and background that went in to their creations.

The internet, as we know it today, did not start off as such. It started at the end of the 1950′s and through the 1960′s as ARPANET, Advanced Research Projects Agencey Network, by the U.S. government. The reason that it was started was to “combat” the growing technical advanves made by the Soviet Union after the launch of their Sputnik in 1957. One of the main ideas behind ARPANET was that if one computer went off line the other in the network should be able to continue to function. I.E.: If one city was bombed, thus taking the computer in that city off line (if not totally distroying it), the rest of the network would still work. Think about the main frame computers that were so popular back then (besides the fact that only large corporations could afford them), if the main compute was damaged and turned off then none of the terminals would work at all. In the present, if the server in your office was shut down you can still do most of the necessary functions on your computer (at least those that do not need “help” from the server). Another example of the is the numerous websites out there: Let’s say that for some reason the servers that host the Google search engine all went off line at the same time. You could still visit all other web sites that are on other servers.

Another reason that the U.S. government took it upon themselves to start this network is that they could not rely on the computer industry to develop this network. Why? This is due to the fact that the coputer industry, similar to just about any other industry, works on profit, or expected profit. They simply did not see the dollar value in this network. A classic example of this came from the movie “Silicon Valley Heist”, based upon the life of Bill Gates. At the beginning of Microsoft they created the DOS system form IBM. In a metting between IBM and Microsoft, Mr. Gates asked that he lease the DOS system for a certain time period to IBM instead of selling it. At the time the IBM executives did not see the potential value of software, instead it was believed that the majority of profits would be made by selling hardware and not software.

Looks like we got off track a bit…Back to ARPANET

At the end of the 1960′s the first “network” was ready to be tested. It was decided that the network would be hosted by UCLA and UCSB. This is a critical fact in understanding the general background of the internet. Both of the hosts are universities and not commercial companies that sell products. If you think about it for a minute you can see why the internet is geared more towards open information and not just profits (although, as stated in the previous article, a large ammount of money can be made through the internet and SEO).

At aproximatlety the same time notes from the networking group meetings were saved in a format called RFC (Request for Comments). These notes were ment to gather responses from members and at the same time notify them of other members opinions and findings. It was hoped that keeping unoffical notes would better encourage people to publish their thoughts as they come, and not polish them for publication with the delays involved in rewriting and edition papers. This is very similarto the way newsgroups & forums now work, where people can openly ask questions and make comments as think of them.

Preface
After talking with a number of my clients and colleagues I started to notice a trend with regard to Internet Marketing in general, specifically related to Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing. It was therefore decided that I would publish, here on my web site, a series of articles on these topics. I have been in the field of Marketing & Internet Marketing since 1997 so I have acquired a vast amount of experience in these fields. In this period I have seen both great success stories along side with huge failures due to unethical marketers and contractors.

Instead of waiting to finish the entire series and then publish it, I decided to publish the individual articles as they are completed. So please be patient as they come and do not forget to check back every few days for new articles and advice.

It is my hope that beyond general enlightenment, they will be usefull for you, a kind of reference manual. Obviously, if you wish to retain my services that would be more than welcome. However, as I stated earlier, the main purpose of this series is to teach you how to successfully market your web site and to avoid falling victim to fraudulent or unethical SEO companies.

Introduction
If you have your own web site, or are planning on starting one, chances are you want as many people as possible to know about it. Most websites are there for a profit, they can sell you something directly or they can just be a kind of online brochure. Just having a web site without marketing it is similar to opening a store in your back yard…with the exception of your family and friends no one will know it is there.

So, how can you market your web site? You start off by making sure that the URL (website address) is on every single piece of paper that leaves your office.

That in itself is not enough, so most people think that the next stage is buying advertising for your site. This can be something small for example an ad in a local newspaper, or it can be a huge investment in a television commercial during the Superbowl. Another way to go is to buy ad space in different web sites and their newsletters. While all of these can work they all have the same basic flaw:

When the time period is up, you have to pay again to be included in the next available slot. If we go back to the newspaper you would have to pay every week or every month to constantly be there.

Most people think that this, having to re-pay again and again, is the only way to advertise….WRONG!!! Among the most cost effective ways to advertise your website is thru the various search engines. Think about it for a minute, most of the search engines do not charge anything to be included in their search results. That is free advertising for you, if you know what you are doing. I personally know of a owner of a web site, who I will not name online, who makes a huge amount of money just thru search engine traffic. This person started his site in April 2002, and by the end of August he was making more than $20,000.00 per month. All while working from his home. How did he do it? He studied the way that search engines work and built his site accordingly.

“Where is the catch?”, you ask. The catch is that you have to optimize your web site and web pages, hence the term Search Engine Optimization a.k.a. S.E.O., so that the search engines can “read” them and include them in their results. While the placement itself, in the search engines, usually does not cost you anything, you have to put the time and effort to make sure that the search engines can index your pages. Search engines can not read the text inside of images and most of the do not read any of the texts in flash files.

O.K., so how do I optimize my site for the search engines? We will start off by going over the history of the internet and the search engines and how they work. This will help you understand later on why some practices work while others do not work. Some practices can get your web site penalized or even banned from the search engines, so you have to be very carefull.

I have said it before and will probably do so again, it is my belief that the only way to truly succeed in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing is to understand their history. Once you understand how they started out, other bits and pieces will soon fall in place.

Now when I say “truly succeed”, I mean that once your site is up and running, and you have optimized it for the Search Engines, you should be getting literally thousands of hits per day. One of the pitfalls that some website owners fall into is to making doorway pages with redirects. These doorway pages may work at first, but once your redirects are noticed by the search engines then chances are you will be penalized or banned. On the other hand if you truly optimize your site then chances are that no matter what changes the Search Engines make to their algorithms you will still be receiving large amounts of traffic.

Let us take a look at part of the Search Engine History and then we will get back to “discussion”:

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In the year 1990 a University of McGill student creates the first search tool (called Archie), using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) servers to archive Internet Files.

In 1991 Mark McCahill from the University of Minnesota launches Gopher. This was intended as an alternative to the 1990 Archie.

Now starts the fun…in 1992 Veronica was created by the University of Nevada. This is a search tool that scans Gopher servers for text file.

In 1993 Jughead was created, meant to be an enhancement to the Gopher system by adding both Boolean and Keyword searches.

MIT student Matthew Gray creates the World Wide Web Wanderer in 1993. This is the earliest acclaimed Web Robot.

Galaxy, the first Web Directory, was launched in 1994.

Think that Yahoo was their from the beginning? Guess again, although others started in the early 1990′s Yahoo was started in 1994 by two Stanford University Electrical Engineering candidates to keep track of their personal Internet interests.

WebCrawler was created in 1994 University of Washington student.

Now comes the Lycos Search Engine, started in 1994 a Carnegie Melon student. It originally had 54,000 documents in it’s directory. Webmasters and Website owners started to submit their sites for inclusion in Lycos.

February 1995 Infoseek was released to the public. In December of that same year it received a huge break by becoming the default Search Engine for Netscape.

Starting to notice a pattern yet…?

Excite was launched in October of 1995 by six entrepreneurs out of California in order to manage information on the Internet.

AltsVista was introduced to the public in December of 1995 and gain popularity rapidly due to unique features it had.

SearchSavvy, what is believed to be the first Meta Search Engine, was introduced in 1995 by Colorado State University’s Daniel Dreilinger.

They say that laziness is the mother & father of all inventions. Well, in 1995 automatic Search Engine Submission software was released. For those of you who have not been there yet, this allows you to submit a site to a number of Search Engines all at once with a “click of a button”. Many website owners and marketers quickly utilized this software to submit 1000′s of web pages each day to the Search Engines, in an attempt to gain better positions for their sites. Various Search Engines quickly caught on to this and began to penalize and/or sites that were abusing the software.

During 1995-1996 Web Site owners, Webmasters, and Web Marketers discover that the use of Meta Tags in their HTML code can increase their rankings in the Search Engines.

In February of 1996 a grant was given to Eric Brewer and Paul Gauthier in order to study how the use of clustered and inexpensive workstation computers can create the same computing capabilities as supercomputers. This was the start of Inktomi.

In October of 1996 a categorized directory of Website listings, named LookSmart, is introduced.

In 1996 Search Engine Optimizers begin a game of cat and mouse with the Search Engines. As the Search Engine Optimizers find techniques to achieve better positions for their sites, Search Engines begin to change their algorithms in an effort to respond to this.

AskJeeves is launched in April of 1997 with the intent of emphasizing ease of use and the ability to learn.

Bill Gross Launches GoTo in 1997, the new twist here is that they were auctioning off search results. This is the first Pay Per Click (PPC) Search Engine.

In 1997 a new software is introduced to the industry. This software would automatically check Web Site ranking in the major Search Engines.

In 1998 the Open Directory Project was launched. It’s goal was becoming the world’s most comprehensive directory.

Wondering where and when the Google Search Engine started?

Well in 1998 two Stanford Computer Science graduate students introduce Google, aiming for it to take a unique approach to search results and relevancy.

In September of 1998 Microsoft launched MSN Search. It was originally developed for users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and the Microsoft Network.

Another big step that the Search Engines took with their algorithms was in 1998 when they started to consider off page considerations for their results. One of the most widely know of these is Link Popularity which is still used both by the Search Engines and subsequently by the Search Engine Optimizers.

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This list is not complete, but it can give you an idea as to how and why they started. There are two important themes to consider when Optimizing your site of the Search Engines. The first is that most of the Search Engines started off as University (research) projects, and thus their algorithms are meant to work for the users and not site owners or marketers. The second is that once the various Search Engine noticed that Web Site Owners / Marketers “cracked” their algorithms, the Search Engines updated them accordingly to continue returning relevant search results.

When you start to think about ways to market your web site one of the ways that come to mind is Affiliate Marketing. What is Affiliate Marketing? In short it is paying other advertisers a percent of the sales they generate. Usually the Affiliates will put a link on their web site to your website, and you then pay them a percent for the sales generated from their visitors.

If you own the site that is receiving these visitors this can be vary advantageous due to the fact that you are only paying for actual sales. However you have to be very very careful to make sure that all of the traffic generated by your Affiliates is accurately tracked and credited. If word gets around that you did not credit an Affiliate of yours correctly for a sale, you may find that no Affiliate will be willing to work for you. Keep in mind that your are in essence getting almost free traffic sent to your web site and paying only when YOU close the sale.

In short Affiliate Marketing can bring in literally thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars in sales to your website and company with little or no upfront costs. You just have to make sure that you are ready to track and administer the Affiliate program properly. If you think that Affiliate Marketing can help supplement your Marketing efforts, but are not sure how to start, or are not able to administer the day to day operation needed to run a successful Affiliate Program feel free to contact us. We have the ability and the experience to help you get setup or to run your Affiliate Program for you.

If you are the Affiliate, then your end of the Affiliate Marketing is just the opposite. You have, or are planning to soon have, your web site, which generates a certain amount of traffic. By joining an Affiliate Program you are now able to concentrate on generating new visitors without having to worry about customer support, shipping, payment gateways, insurance, warehousing etc…When trying to decide which Affiliate Program to join there are quite a few things to consider, among them minimum payments, commission level, the items being sold and much more. The best thing to do is to find one of the many online forums and see what others say about the area you are looking into and to the specific Affiliate Program.

Originally posted by Helen Dayman dayman@ion.com.au at www.alon-cohen.com

Your on-line business is growing, traffic to your website is increasing and orders are coming in fast. Too fast. Prospective customers are going elsewhere as your site is becoming congested. Your web pages are taking too long to load and error messages are greeting their requests.

Time to find a solution to this common problem for rapidly growing on-line businesses. Dedicated Server Hosting is the answer.

What is the difference you ask? Currently your website is sharing a server with many other websites. Each of these websites generates traffic through the server. Imagine for a moment, hundreds of busy websites generating traffic flow through this server.

Hosting of your website on this shared server might be limited by the amount of space available to you, say 20gb. Maybe your provider limits uploading and downloading of data to your site with excess traffic flow charged. These restrictions can impair the growth of a rapidly growing on-line business.

There is a solution to this ever-increasing problem. Your on-line business can be hosted on a single computer linked into a network. This dedicated server is reserved to service the needs of a single customer, you. Without the encumbrance of the server dividing the access between many hosted sites, it is able to provide faster access to data.

The server can be customised to meet the exact needs of your on-line business. Maybe you, the business owner, have a number of businesses. A dedicated server can also host a large number of virtual domains enabling your other on-line businesses to be hosted and accessed separately by your customers. A dedicated server will decrease your monthly hosting fees by eliminating multiple hosting accounts and replacing with a single monthly fee.

It would be great to be able to exercise 100% control over your web presence. With a dedicated server you can specify and modify the entire operating system and install the supporting software that meet up with your website’s requirements. Increase faster access to data, scalability and site analysis. If you have the experience, you can configure the CPU speed and partition the server to your specifications.

The dedicated server does not share bandwidth or storage space, you have the entire server to yourself. As no other user has access to the server, you can modify the settings. You can optimise the server for certain web applications such as e-commerce and multimedia.

One of the greatest advantages of a dedicated server is that you are basically renting it. If it breaks down it is the responsibility of the provider to fix it. They will maintain equipment and the connectivity of the server. Any repairs or replacement of hardware components is the responsibility of the provider.

You as the user usually have two service options, managed or unmanaged. The unmanaged service option is more for the user who has experience with programming, installing applications and configuring the server. This service is more economical for advanced users.

Those users who are less confident in their technical expertise can opt for the managed service. The managed service is ideal as it allows the user to customise the server without having the technical expertise.

Once you have made the decision to host your on-line business on a dedicated server, sit back and watch your business grow.