Monday, August 25, 2008

They're Not Just Numbers! by Jennifer Haubein

After your web site is live and on the web, you're all done right? Not exactly, now comes the fun part tracking your web site visitors and statistics. Yes, you heard me I said "fun". This part can be fun if you know what you are looking for and have a system in place to help. So you are ready to start tracking, but what do all of these weird terms mean. Let's first start with some definitions and then I will show you what is most important to track and what you can ignore.

Page Loads- The number of time a page is viewed and loaded on your website.

Unique Visitors- How many individuals are viewing your website.

Returning Visitors- How many visitors to your site are returning to your website.

First Time Visitors- How many visitors to your site are new.

These website stats are usually displayed in a summary page or the first page of website tracker tool. Use these stats to determine trends. Does your website have a weekday rush and a weekend slump? Is your website in general growing or declining?

Besides these summary statistics, there is much more information that will help you grow your website and online marketing. For my website stats I use StatCounter so if you use different platforms the wording might be a little different. The best place to find out where your website traffic is coming from is to look at "Recent Came From" stats or in Google it is called "Traffic Sources Overview" in your Dashboard. This information shows you exactly what links your website traffic is coming from. If there is no link, the traffic is called direct traffic.

This information is important, because it allows you to see if your social networking, blogging, pay per click advertising, and article marketing is paying off. You should be able to tell from this information what sources are bringing the most traffic to your website.

Also, it's important to take a look at your keyword stats. How are users searching for your website? Is your search engine optimized for the important keywords? Are people clicking on your search engine ads?

There are so many more statistics you can pay attention to with your website such as visitor maps, internet browser stats, and visit length. But start with the stats mentioned above and then move on to these more complicated website stats.

Now, that you've learned what you should be tracking I suggest getting a weekly report emailed to you automatically with all of this information. Both tools I recommend allow you to have this set up. Then analyze the data every week and plug it into a spreadsheet. If you aren't happy with your stats, then begin to implement some changes to your website and traffic sources. But keep in mind that a brand new website needs a few months time to grow its stats and traffic.

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR NEWLETTER OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include this complete blurb with it: Jennifer Haubein publishes "SiteNotes" a FREE bi-weekly ezine for small business owners who want a website that actually works. If you're ready to start making more money online, get your FREE tips now at www.BestBizWebsiteSolutions.com/newsletter.html

About the Author

Jennifer Haubein publishes "SiteNotes" a FREE bi-weekly ezine for small business owners who want a website that actually works. If you're ready to get insider tips website developers don't want you to know, and start making more money online, get your FREE tips now at http://www.BestBizWebsiteSolutions.com/newsletter.html.

Paidl Web Hosting vs. Unpaid Web-Hosting by William Taylor

Professional Web Hosting vs. Unpaid Webhosting
Both free and professional web hosting have their benefits and down sides. Despite, before the best type of web solution can be reached the web-mater will want to think about the supreme motivator for the website.
If you are looking for a home-page, craft web-site, or non-profit web-site a free web-siteservice will support the basics of what is wanted at just the right price- free. Although a non-paid web-site will not support a professional scene for a business, or a webmaster looking for credibility, as unfortunately free services look highly "inexpensive" then little else can be expected from something that priced zero.
A nonpaid website will offer webmaster's free templates for the web-design of the web-page, and good wizards that guide the webmaster gradually by the uploading process. Frequently a non-paid service may give zero paid domains and email facilities with their plan.
Buyer service is often added, despite how good the service is will often change. The biggest situation with a non-paid service is, the total of data transfer onto the site may be limited, and the sizes of the files being transported may also be small. Non-paid web-hosting firms often feel a lot of down time, so they can at times be unreliable. Since the site is free, the web-hosting firm may very well be depending on advertiaers in the way of banner ads to keep the firm in business. If this is the satuation, having a business with flashing banners will actually cramp your shape, credibility, and scare away potential prospects.
Paid hosting services are often used by webmasters to keep sites running smoothly in business, what this show is the nice web-hosting firms will give top-notch technical service, and have many of happy clients who are willing to write their testimonies. Professional firms will generally give a 100% satisfaction guarantee, live chats, and phone services for clients facing problems.
Many pro firms will also give discounts and bonuses for your account, and merit you for paying properly. Other things that a professional hosting firm will give is good web-space, and disk space. Always big quantity of uptime will be guaranteed, and most times failure to reserve this amount of uptime will issue in redress from firm to their clients.
Master services may be expensive, but the plans is far more precious, and professional firms never take disk space from their clients in order to place their paid banners on. Depending on what a customer need when they build a web-site, will have a lot of bearing on their choice of web hosting providers. For a webmaster that is building a reliable business venture, a professional web-hosting plan is vital to business success.

About the Author

William Taylor writes regularly about webmasters related topics. I hope you enjoy this article.

Seo Blogging Software Reviewed by Karin Hastings

Seo blogging software was usually hard to find and not much to write home about. That has all changed with the release of the easy seo blogging software known as Firepow.
There are a number of ways that this innovative blogging software helps with search engine optimization or SEO.
Firstly, there are customized themes already in the program that have been specifically formatted to help with your rankings in the search engines.
Secondly, you don't actually need to know any html or how to create a website as you can install a blog with just a few mouse clicks.
Thirdly, it is the ultimate traffic tool. It will help you to automatically build links to your site, drive targetted traffic to your blogs, plus enhance your link building with the powerful all inclusive blog network within this seo blogging software.
Fourthly, there are over 40 plugins installed in this program - many of them exclusive to FP that will also help with your ranking efforts.
Fifthly, you can easily add news and other people's rss feeds to your blog and you can optimize every blog post with targetted keywords. This is another feature to improve the quality and diversity of your content.
Six is the ability to create viral content on your site. We all know video content is a valuable asset. This plugin makes your video content creation AUTOMATIC.
You know the plugin Related Posts, that brings up a bunch of posts from your blog that are related to the post being read and displays them under that post?
Related videos works the same:
1. You choose to activate related videos for the post you are writing.
2. Related Videos scans the text of your post, and finds related videos on the web related to your post.
3. It displays thumbnails of those videos under your post AND...
4. It creates a page on your site, with that video from the internet ALREADY embedded! So...
5. The user clicks through to the video, watches it there on your site, AND if he loves it and wants to share the URL... he looks to the address bar and guess what he of course sees... YOUR URL!
6. Finally, the videos that the plugin pulls aren't just the most relevant to your content, they're the most relevant AND the highest rated and most viewed!
This allows you insert RSS feeds onto your blog so each update to a feed is converted into a post, and you get fresh content every time someone ELSE updates their site.
You can also get instant backlinks with the powerful RSS submission tool. This is the first of the Firepow Promotional Tools. It has a very simple function.
You click a button. Yes ONE button...
And the software submits your websites RSS feed to almost 20 RSS Feed Directories.
To get started with the ultimate seo blogging software go to www.OrderFirepow.com

About the Author

To learn more about {a target="_new" href=" http://www.orderfirepow.com "}Firepow software or to invest in it now at a special price just go straight to http://www.orderfirepow.com

Consider Website Hosting Priorities by David Smith

I have been building and publishing websites for a number of years now and started out with exceptionally insignificant basic needs. At the inception I was happy with a free package that managed the tasks I believed I needed at that time. This was a introductory package that was included at no cost with my high speed internet access.
When you take advanatage of these , the number of features is especially limited but it will lead you to the web site hosting business. Although they might be totally unacceptable to the experienced webmaster, they do satisfy a basic need. This is a way to learn the basics at no cost.
As I learned more about web site development the hunger for a superior website took me through another stage of web site hosting and development. This was still in the free realm though. I began experimenting with the other types of free websites offered by webhosts such as Yahoo and Geocities. This seemed like a immense jump for me at the time and I was quite proud of the achievement.
Again, although these would be considered of no value by the practiced webmasters, they filled a need. I learned more about creating websites for at no cost while experiencing a gentle learning curve.
It was at this point that I took the big step into paid . This permitted me to create websites that exhibited that I had much larger control over the appearance and functionality. The learning curve became a bit steeper since then. The today allow anyone to create professional looking websites that empower interaction with the website users. Most packages have server side website building applications to build very nice looking websites that will serve most basic requirements.
Most of the today are very alike in pricing and features. There are a few features that I suggest you consider very carefully. In my view these would be the most consequentialdifferences in the offerings.
One essential feature you should understand on signup is the term bandwidth. Many applications such as the very fashionable blogging can generate a great amount of traffic and resources demands on your web site hosting packages. This is where may differ greatly. Some simply do not permit the resource load (bandwidth) that many customary applications require. This could be cause for them to suspend website activity at any time with no notification. This will be very frustrating for you.
I have left another issue to the end because from my experienced point of view it is the extremely most pivotal and perhaps misrepresented by some web site hosting providers.
It really is of no consequence how experienced you are in building and uploading websites; there are times when you are going to require support from your . Now some of these people go to great lengths to trumpet that is a priority. Unfortunately that is not always the truth. Nothing is more frustrating than having a website that is not running properly and not potential viewers to access it.
Your patience will be tested to the very limits if you have an concern and you can't get any body to answer to your repeated requests for help from your . I strongly suggest you research customer testimonials or forums to authenticate their record regarding customer satisfaction. Remember that if you have good support, you can settle any issue in building, publishing and maintaining your web site.
For a great web hosting package I suggest you investigate the benefits of Hostmonster Webhosting at http://www.hostmonster.the-rite-site.com .

About the Author

David Smith writes regularly about webmasters related topics. I hope you enjoy this article.