The Jeffrey And Tracey Info Emporium

Here’s what your website must have to get lots of traffic - links pointing to your site. The more you have, the more traffic you get.

But how do you get links pointing to your site? Well you could email webmasters and ask them to put a link on their site (reciprocal links). But that’s rather slow. You need something that will get other people link to your site.

How do you get other people linking to your site? Here are some ideas:

Content

People want content. If your site has lots of good fresh content try providing free content feeds. You get links back to your site, and they get free updated content from your site.

Articles

Write good quality and useful articles and put a link to your site at the bottom. Allow people to freely publish them. The better and more useful the article the more people will publish it and the more links back to your site you will have.

Services

For example on my website Crossword Heaven (http://www.crosswordheaven.com) I have a service where webmasters can add a crossword to their site. On my site PerkyPup.com (http://www.perkypup.com) I provide quotes that other webmasters can link to by means of a dynamic image.

Another example is a “recommend this site” service. That is you have a page on your site that people can use to recommend a website. People get to the page through a link on the website that they want to recommend.

Or how about a service that let’s people “brand” images with some text?

Affiliate links

I like to think of affiliate links as “paid for” links. Basically you’re paying someone to link to your site. Do they work? Yes! You win because you only pay the affiliate when a sale is made (ok, there are exceptions) and the affiliate wins because they get paid.

eBooks

People love eBooks. Create an eBook with links to your site in it. The more popular the eBook is the more links back to your site you will get. Plus eBooks go hand in hand with affiliate programs.

Of course there are many more ideas than these. The thing is to think about ways of getting people linking to your site. It doesn’t matter how crazy the idea sounds. In fact sometimes crazy is good. Remember all those times someone sent you a link to a wacky web site? Just think about how much traffic that website must get!

Find out how one web site averages over $27,000USD in revenue per month with only around 100 visitors a day. Visit kdaviesnz.com and download this essential *FREE* report today!

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Web Analytics - Murder by Numbers - Part 1 Jason OConnor

Want to know a methodology to learn the exact effectiveness of
every e-marketing initiative you conduct? It’s a method that
every company online should implement. It’s a must-have if
you’re actively trying to leverage your web presence to increase
your bottom line.

One of the great aspects of the Internet and e-marketing is its
ability to give immediate results and feedback regarding all
kinds of online activities. This of course requires tracking.

Let us delve into the world of tracking. Part 1 of this two part
series will explain the basics of e-marketing tracking. Part 2
will provide a fool-proof method for website statistical
acquisition.

If you rent some banner ad space at a website whose audience is
your target market, you can learn exactly how many people saw
your banner ad and how many clicked through to your site. You
can also determine how many people actually became a lead from
the banner ad and even see how many were converted into a sale.

If the numbers were low the first time around, you can create a
new banner ad and submit it again, then track those results. You
can keep tweaking ad infinitum until you discover the perfect
combination of design, copy and presentation that yields the
best results. This is one of the wonders of the Net. But you’ll
need a way to make sense of all the numbers. And there will be a
lot of numbers. Enter Web Analytics.

Here are the most important data points for an e-marketer:

1.Cost for campaign 2.Reach or total visits (in Netspeak,
‘eyeballs’) 3.Unique visits 4.Click-thru number 5.Click-thru
percentage 6.Number of leads generated 7.Cost per lead 8.Lead
conversion rate 9.Lead to sales ratio 10.Number of sales
generated

In the banner ad example above, let’s say the statistics for a
day are:

1.The banner ad’s cost for the day = $500 2.Total visits = 1000
3.Unique visits = 800 4.Click-thru number = 50 5.Click-thru
percentage = 5% 6.Leads generated = 20 7.Cost per lead = $25
8.Lead conversion rate = 40% 9.Lead to sales ratio = 10%
10.Sales generated = 2

The daily, weekly or monthly visits to the site that houses your
banner ad will be the reach or visits to the site. This number
can be broken down to both total and unique visits. If there
were a 1000 visits to that web page in a day but 200 of those
visits were from the same people visiting twice in that day (and
all the rest came only once), then total visits is 1000 and
unique visits is 800. This is because if 200 people came to the
site twice that day, then 200 of the total visits for the day
were repeats which leaves 800 unique visitors (1000 – 200 = 800).

Continuing with the example, the number of people who view the
banner ad and actually click on it over to your site is the
click-thru number. The click-thru percentage is ascertained by
dividing the number of click-thrus by the number of page visits.
For example, if 50 people clicked-thru to your site from the
banner, and there were a total of 1000 banner views (because
there were 1000 views to that page that had the banner ad on
it), then the equation would be 50 divided by 1000, or 5%. (You
could also use the unique visits to calculate this percentage:
50/800 = 6.25%.)

Leads acquired is how many people actually filled out a form on
your site or called as a result of the banner ad. In other
words, the user saw the banner ad on another site, clicked the
banner thru to your site, and then actually gave you their
information via a web form or phone call.

Cost per lead is very important. The lower this is the better.
You calculate this by dividing the total cost by the number of
leads, in this case $500 divided by 20 leads, or $25 per lead.

The lead conversion rate is the percentage of new leads you
obtained from the visitors driven to your web page as a direct
result of the banner ad. Of course this page needs a call to
action in order to convert a visitor to a lead. A call to action
is a statement on the page that says “Call today” and gives a
phone number or is a link that points someone to a web form.

If your banner ad cost $500 and you got 20 leads (leads
acquired), then your cost per lead for this banner ad campaign
was $25.

If 2 people out of the 20 new leads actually bought your product
or service, then your lead to sales ratio is 1/10 or 10%.

Obviously, the whole point of all this is to increase the last
number, our final sales. By monitoring all these numbers
continuously and systematically, we can gain an almost
omnipotent view of our various e-marketing campaigns. We can
then leverage that knowledge to improve each initiative to yield
the best results.

Look for Part 2 of this two-part series. It will explain how to
get all the initial web statistics to plug into these formulas.
It will also describe a great method for obtaining accurate
click-thru numbers.

Good luck number crunching! The better you get at it, the more
sales you’ll create.

It is common knowledge that we need links to our website to boost our rankings with the search engines. Those links are even more important if they are relevant to the content of our website. The problem is getting those kind of links.

Think about it. How often have you performed a search and been led to a links page? I’m willing to wager that it hasn’t been often. Even if you are lucky enough to place your link on a links page with similar content, or better yet, with your own detail page, you can’t be sure that the owner of the website has made the link a permanent one (some of these kinds of links create a page when clicked on but otherwise are not available - meaning the search engines don’t see them). If it is a permanent link, have they instructed the search engines to follow all links?

I have been mulling this over lately and decided I wanted to conduct an experiment where I have control of all the variables. I set up a new website containing tools to help optimize your webpages. There is also a directory that features listings that lead to a detail page. I have made all the URL’s permanent, search engine friendly, and with instructions to follow all links. Contributors are allowed to write their own detail page using their keywords as they see fit, as well as specify their keywords for the page. All that’s needed now is to get the PageRank(PR) up so that the links are more valuable. To do this, I have specific instructions for reciprocal linking, however, this is not mandatory and only affects how high you are placed on the list.

As you can see, I need some test subjects. I’m looking for people to place a link and then contact me after several months to let me know if their detail page is performing for them, If it has a PageRank(PR), and if you have any suggestions. If you are interested in participating, visit Webmaster Nook to submit your link to the directory. There is, of course, no charge. I plan on publishing an article on the outcome in approximately six months. If these kinds of links prove to be effective, this will tell us how to set up directories in the future to make them more valuable to our visitors and contributors.

Please visit Webmaster Nook to contribute to my findings.

Do you want a fantastic way to instantly begin to
drive massive numbers of target traffic to your
website? If you answered YES, then I think I have a
cute solution for you.

Search Engines get the most of web traffic… And
that’s the plain and simple truth..!

Search engines are designed to give web searchers
results based on their search criteria. If I search
for “Healthy Eating Habits” as an instance, the
search engine would have to deliver to me search
results that are exact, or very close to what I
searched for.

If it doesn’t, I discard the search engine and come
to the conclusion that it is not good enough or its
totally useless! This gives the search engine a
“bad name”.

Search engines are aware of this and to stay in
business, they do all they can to give good
results.

Your goal is to create viral content which spreads
itself deep on the web and which of course makes
the job of the search engines easy.

Its really simple. Get the search engines to love
you and they will reward you with traffic.

Here is how to do it.

Start With An SEO Friendly Title.

Before now, I just pick up my pen and jump into my
articles with no thoughts at all. Now, I am wiser.
What I do first is find out what people are looking
for on the search engines.

For example, at the start of this article, I
checked for how many times the words “web site traffic”, “SEO”, “SEO Articles” and “Articles”
were searched last month.

The figures I got were as at the time of this
writing were:

“website traffic” - searched 60643 times

“SEO” - searched 68745

“SEO articles” - searched 1388

“Article” - searched 61205

Once I got the figures, I then went ahead to create
a title that included these words in them.

It doesn’t seem obvious by looking at the title of
my article but what I did simply was to increase
the chances of this article getting read by the
191981 who are likely to search for these terms
this month.

How did I get that figure?

It is simple. Since my article title contains each
one of these words or group of phrases, each time
they are searched for, the search engine sees them
as relevant and shows my article to the searcher.

You can get started for keyword research by using
Overture Keyword Tool, presently located at
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

That is not all. You need to create the perfect SEO
traffic generating machine by creating keyword
density.

This is another simple but immensely rewarding
tweak. Just make your “major” words.. I mean your
keywords to show up over and over again with the
body of your article. This creates keyword density.

Since search engines are designed to look at
content and rank them based on the number of times
keywords are repeated in the content, doing this
(making your materials keyword dense) will increase
your article’s “loveability” by the search engines
and will mean more traffic reward.

You must however not overdo it or you will be
tagged a keyword spammer!

The key to success is balance. These two little
strategies kick-starts you and puts you in line for
an astronomical increase in web site traffic using Search Engine Optimized (SEO) articles.

In Part 2, I will show you exactly how to convert your hard work into real results.

Here is how to put an end to poor results and start
increasing your sales and profits right away! Join the profitbomb forum NOW and get all the help you need.

http://profitbomb.com/forum

You have full permission to republish this article
in print or electronic form as long as this notice
and the author’s resource box is attached unedited.

Do remember to send the author a courtesy note
detailing the use of the article.

© Oluwafisayo, 2006. admin@profitbomb.com

Internet news releases are the key to getting a quick flow of traffic to your web site.

Whilst Internet news releases can drive traffic, very few web sites use them as part of their Internet marketing strategy, as they think they’re too expensive and just for larger companies.

Internet news releases are for ALL companies, large or small, and they are surprisingly cost effective. They are similar to the press releases sent to newspapers and magazines - only we’re using the more cost effective version – web, or Internet news releases.

Press Releases - Why they don’t Work

A press release is of very little value to you – a web address in the newspaper or on the radio, requires the potential site visitor to write the information down and visit later, when they’re at their computer. It simply doesn’t work like that

If they’re not already at their computer, looking for what you have to offer, and able to get it by simply clicking a link, then they’re not interested!

What they do

A web news release can be similar to an article, but it’s put together differently, as it’s targeted at the journalists that provide content for Google News, Yahoo News, MSN News, etc.

Nothing released onto the Internet ever goes away, so you may get traffic over a long time span, but we are aiming for a lot of traffic over a short time span – we expect most of the traffic will arrive within 3 to 7 days of submission to the various news release web sites.

Like keyword articles, a news release is re-distributed via .XML feeds, so they will also appear in blogs, and in the news section of a wide variety of web sites.

Get a Traffic Surge

The web, or Internet news release has a shorter life span than an article, but the traffic can come in a large surge, whereas an article will bring in a steady stream of visitors over a long time span.

A good news release, which catches the imagination of news websites, can see traffic of tens or even hundreds of thousands.

How to Write a Good News Release

Of course, your news release needs to be of interest to viewers to get visits to your website, so what makes a good one?

· Something topical that people are interested in

· Something that has a high perceived value, that you are giving away for free

· Something that you have that is unique

The fact is, most websites can put out something to catch the public’s imagination, but they haven’t thought about it!

A good Internet marketing company can draft, and distribute a web release that will pull traffic.

Cost Effective

The cost of an Internet news release is very low – not the $2,000 US dollars charged by many press release agencies, in most cases it’s just a few hundred dollars!

Targeting news release sites is one of the most cost effective, if not the most cost effective way of marketing on the Internet.

For more information on cost effective viral marketing strategies to increase your sales and bottom line profits, please visit our web site: http://www.internet-viral-marketing.com

1. Trade links with other websites. Websites that are related are best, simply because the user is more likely to be interested in the related link. For example, if someone was looking around a web design site, they are more likely to be interested in a web hosting links than a sausage appreciation society website. However, any link is good (as long as it isn’t with a subject you don’t want to be affiliated with, i.e. adult websites). It also has the added advantage of increasing search engine rank.

Websites to help with this would be:

• www.gotlinks.com, which is an automated link exchange.
• www.linkmarket.net, which is semi automated link exchange.
• www.honestlinks.com, which helps you build a successful link page.

2. Sign up with a banner exchanges or traffic exchanges. They provide you with a way of reaching an audience, although the audience may not be interested in your website’s subject. I would never pay for this service, but as it’s free is worth the effort.

Websites to help with this are:

• www.bpath.com offer free banner exchange.
• www.trafficswarm.com offer free and paid for traffic exchange.

3. Offer an RSS feed. When people read it, they will be reminded of your website. Also, they provide you with inward links to your website, which search engines like. Search engines also like websites that offer an RSS feed.

Websites to help are:

• www.w3schools.com has tutorials to help publish an RSS feed.
• www.syndic8.com Will publish your RSS feed, with over 300,000 other feeds listed.
• www.daypop.com Will also publish your RSS feed, with over 50 000 other feeds listed.
• Www.Newsisfree.com Again, will also publish your RSS feed, with over 18 000 other feeds listed.

4. Form an online community. It could be an online message board, e-mail discussion list or chat room. When people get involved in your community they will regularly return to communicate with others. They are hard to start up, but will pay off.

Websites to help are:

• www.sparklit.com offers free forums
• www.bravenet.com offers free and paid message boards etc
• www.tinit.co.uk offers free message boards and chat rooms for your site

5. Write articles and submit them to article submission sites. They advertise your site, and provide you with inward links. Remember to include a link to your website in the ‘About the Author’ section.

Websites to help are:

• www.goarticles.com will list your articles
• www.articledepot.co.uk will also list your articles
• www.ezonearticles.com will also list your articles

6. Give away an electronic online freebie, and allow your users to distribute it. This will increase your ad exposure and attract people to your website. It may cost you or you may be able to persuade a company to let you have it free. Also, list it on a freebies site.

Websites to help are:

• www.thefreesite.com will list your freebie
• www.freebiedot.com will also list your freebie.

7. Join a forum, and include a link to your site in your signature. Also, when ever someone asks for advise on selecting a service, recommend your website (if it is relevant).

8. Partner with another website offering a similar service. For example, on the Big Wow site, we have a page advertising our partner who offers web design services. In return, they recommend us to their clients. This costs nothing on both parts, but is very effective.

9. Advertise your business on Google Adwords, Yahoo Overture, or Bpath Bidvertiser. These are effective, but you do have to pay for them. They can be subsidised by displaying the adverts on your site as well.

Websites to help are:

• https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/Login?sourceid=AWO&subid=UK-ET-ADS&hl=en_GB is for Google Adwords
• http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/ is for Yahoo Overture
• http://www.bidvertiser.com/bdv/bidvertiser/bdv_publisher.dbm?bdv_aff_id=13 is for Bpath Bidvertiser.
• http://services.google.com/marketing/links/UK-OA-EDR To get £20 off your first Adwords account

10. Be included in newsletters. Again, this is expensive but effective. You could be an advert, or in an interview.

Websites to help are:

• www.sitepronews.com- large newsletter offering a range of ways of advertising
• www.bravenet.com can be included in their many mailings.

Tim Shaw is director of (Big Wow Web Hosting), a cheap and reliable web host. He has written several books and ebooks on web hosting, and has had many years experience in computers, the web and web hosting.

It’s about time someone let the cat out of the bag, regarding traffic exchange programs and guaranteed traffic. I wasn’t seeing the truth being written about the subject anywhere, so I decided to take it upon myself to reveal the truth about these programs.

In a nutshell, they don’t work. How do I know? Because I tested them. I tested them good and I tested them fairly. While I wasn’t really surprised at the results, I was surprised at the depths in which these programs failed.

Oh, you’ll get plenty of traffic to be sure. But it’s garbage traffic plain and simple. Like the saying says, “garbage in, garbage out!”

For example, I tested the most popular and best known guaranteed traffic program, run by one of the Internet’s most famous marketers. I purchased 10,000 pop-under ads for $99. I then sat back and observed.

Well, it took approximately two weeks for my 10,000 pop- unders to be displayed. And at the end of two weeks I had made zero sales. Nada! Zilch!

I have to admit, even though I wasn’t expecting a cash windfall, those results made me realize the quality of traffic was worse than I thought. Much worse.

But I wanted to make sure I was being extra fair, so I purchased 10,000 more pop-under ads from the same company. Again, it took right around two weeks for all my pop-unders to be displayed. And once again I achieved zero sales.

Now I’m no novice when it comes to marketing. I’ve been in this game for over 25 years, so I know what I’m doing. My offer was strong and my sales letter was a proven winner.

Plus, I was making plenty of sales using other advertsing methods.

However, my test further illustrates how important traffic quality really is. It’s not the quantity of traffic that’s most important, it’s the quality.

My advice: Stay away from guaranteed traffic programs.

My test involving Traffic Exchange Programs (also known as Start Page Rotators) brought me to the same conclusion. (Although these programs are free for the most part and didn’t cost me any money.) You’ll receive plenty of traffic, but converting that traffic into sales is an entirely different matter. Here’s why:

1. There is much more competition for traffic exchange programs. Many new companies have joined the mix meaning that any one traffic exchange program has fewer page views to offer.

2. Many webmasters are members of several traffic exchange programs, meaning they are seeing the same ads over and over again, across the board–thus diluting the overall effectiveness of the programs.

3. Many people have pop-up blocking on their sites making it increasingly difficult to harvest email addresses using that method.

4. Cheating is very common. Many unscrupulous individuals use software to open hundreds of start pages each day in a variety of traffic exchange programs. Since no one sees the pages, no one buys the products. Also, many individuals sign up for multiple accounts making each page view much less valuable.

My conclusion: Because of rampant cheating and poor conversion ratios, Traffic Exchange Programs just aren’t worth the effort.

About The Author

Dean Phillips is an Internet marketing expert, writer, publisher and entrepreneur. Questions? Comments? Dean can be reached at mailto: dean@lets-make-money.net

Double your income! Internet marketing expert, Dean Phillips will teach you how to double your income, starting today…Guaranteed! For details just visit my website.

Website: http://www.lets-make-money.net

dean@lets-make-money.net

What I’m about to reveal to you in this article will literally change the way you look at ‘Amazon’ forever.

As you know, Amazon is a buyers market place and is a VERY powerful search engine for products of all sorts, especially Books.

Now, you’re probably saying to yourself, “yeah, I already know that about Amazon, but how do I get my share of Amazon’s traffic?”.

Well, I’m going to answer that question in just a few moments, but first, here’s just some of the benefits you’ll receive once you’ve ‘Set-Up’ what I’m about to show you:

- you’ll position yourself as an Expert within your Niche

- you’ll receive Highly Targeted traffic to your website

- you’ll be able to build a HIGHLY targeted ‘Opt-In’ list

Those are some pretty Powerful benefits wouldn’t you say?

And who would of ever guessed that Amazon could deliver this to you.

I only recently learned of this tactic myself from a Very well known Internet marketer who was kind enough to share it with me.

So now, I’m going to do the same for you.

Are you ready to see what Amazon can do for your Business and Credibility?

Enough said, lets get started.

Step #1. Set up a account with Amazon.

This is the easiest part of the whole task. Simply go to http://www.amazon.com and set up an account for yourself.

This should only take a few minutes and is very straight forward.

Step #2. Click on your “Your Name” Store tab.

Once you’ve set up your account you should have been given a password in order to login to your account.

If you’re not logged in already, login now.

Now, from within the members area there should be a row of tabs at the top of the members area, click on the one that says “Your Name” Store(ex. ‘Corys Store’ tab).

This will take you to a different area with a different sub-menu.

Click on the tab in the sub-menu that says “About You Area”.

Step #3. Setting up your “About You Area”.

Now this is where you have to pay ‘Special Attention’ because this is what people will see when they click on your ‘About You’ tab.

Assuming you are at the ‘About You Area’ you’ll notice that you have spots available to put your Picture, Name, Nickname, eMail Address, Real Name and About Me.

Go ahead and fill out all the area’s accept your ‘About Me’.

The ‘About Me’ spot is what I’ll talk about in the next step, but for now, just fill out all the other area’s and if you want to put up a picture of yourself, you can, it’s up to you.

Step #4. Setting up the ‘About Me’ section.

This is probably the single most important part of this whole process because this is where your potential customer will read about who you are and what you and your business is all about, so do take this seriously.

Now, you have about 4,000 characters of space to write up a description about who you are and what your business is about, so its up to you on how long you want your description to be.

Before you start writing your description this is what You have to do First within the first 70 to 80 characters of your ‘About Me’ description and I’ll show you an example of how mine looks so you’ll be able to see this in action.

(ex. About me: Hi, I’m Cory Threlfall and I’m the Editor/Publisher of ‘www.internetwondersezine.com’ which is a …)

Do you see what I’ve done?

I’ve incorporated my ‘Domain Name’ in quotes into my First 70 to 80 characters of my description so when they click on my ‘About Me’ and read my profile they’ll also see my Domain Name, and if they wish to find out more about me they can either ‘Copy and Paste or Type’ my domain into there browser which will then bring them to my website where they can either ‘Subscribe’ to my newsletter or read my sale copy which will then get them to Opt-In to my newsletter.

This is where the ‘List Building’ starts to take place from the traffic sent through Amazon.

Now, we’ve already established that Amazon is a High Traffic website and now that you’ve set up your ‘About Me Area’ the way I’ve outlined it above I’m now going to show you how to direct Amazon’s traffic to your website.

Step #5. Directing Amazon’s traffic to your website.

This is where the fun starts. And once you see How its done you’ll probably kick yourself in the butt like I did when I was shown How-To do this.

What we need to do now is a little exercise so you’ll see for yourself how you’ll tap into Amazon’s traffic.

So, we know that Amazon is best known for Books, so click on the ‘Books’ tab within Amazon’s members area. This will take you to a different page.

In the upper left corner you’ll see a ‘Search Books’ search box.

Now, for the purpose of this exercise, just so that we’re on the same page, lets use ‘internet marketing’ as the search term.

So, go ahead and type that in and press GO!.

You should now see a bunch of listings on books related to ‘internet marketing’.

Scroll down and select the “33 Days To Online Profits” link. This will bring you to its Product Description page.

Within this Product Description page you’ll find Product Details, Editorial Reviews and most important of all, All Customer Reviews.

Notice I said “and most important of all, All Customer Reviews”.

Thats right, all you need to do is ‘Write Reviews’ on books within your particular Niche and when potential customers are reviewing the book you wrote the review on and they scroll down and happen to read your review and click on Your Name to see what you’re all about, guess what they’ll see?

They’ll see your profile with your Name, Nick Name, eMail Address and your ‘About Me’ description with your Domain Name screaming out at them which can easily be typed into there browser.

There you have it, “5 Quick and Easy Steps On HOW-TO Send Your Website A SURGE Of Amazon’s Traffic For FREE!”

I truly hope you see the benefits of writing reviews and how it will make you look in the eyes of your potential customer.

This is a great tactic to use if you’re looking to establish yourself as an Expert within your Niche and at the same time, build a HIGHLY targeted ‘Opt-In’ list that you can market to for years to come.

Cory Threlfall is an Internet Marketing Strategist and is the Editor and Publisher of The Internet Wonders eZine which is published ‘Bi-Weekly’ that focuses on providing Webmasters with quality Articles, Product Reviews, Tips, and More on how to Promote, Build and Increase your Web Traffic! Subscribe at: www.internetwondersezine.com

After having experienced almost all of the traffic analysis
services available on the internet, Statcounter.com is
undeniably the best traffic analysis service. One of the best
things about Statcounter.com is that they offer a free service
package. No strings, it really is free. Another great thing is
the amount of detail that the counter produces about a website
visitor. The only possible down side of the free service is the
log size. All in all, Statcounter.com is a must have for any
website.

Statcounter.com’s free service is amazing. No ads on your site,
your visitors do not ever see anything from Statcounter.com.
Another rare thing about this free service is that they do not
send SPAM. I know that is hard to believe, but it is true. Other
than requested email from them I can not remember receiving any
emails from them. The reason for this is their high traffic
rank. Alexa (www.alexa.com) gives them a rank of 241, which
means that they are the 241st most popular site on the Internet.
With traffic like that they never have to SPAM or place ads on
your site.

The amount of detail that a webmaster receives is astonishing.
The counter tracks everything that a webmaster could ever need.
The stats include:

• Popular Pages
• Entry
  Pages
• Exit Pages
• Came From
• Keyword
  Analysis
• Recent Keyword Activity
• Search Engine
  Wars(What search engines users come from)
• Visitor
  Paths
• Visit Length
• Returning Visit
• Recent Pageload Activity
• Country/State/City/ISP
• Brower
• System
  Stats

All of those are available on the free service. They are all
very specific and very detailed. Statcounter.com is the most
detailed free service available.

If any negative can be said, it must be said with a light touch.
The problem is that I can not fault a free service for anything
because they are giving it away for free. I very much dislike
people who criticize a company’s free service for any reason.
Given all that, the log size of the free service is limited to
100 page loads. They offer two tiers of subscription service
that can take the log size to 10,000 page loads, but the free
service is 100. I would like to see the service with a little
bigger size because it is very difficult to track trends and
long periods of time with the small log size. Again, I must
repeat, that is not criticism, just a little wishful thinking.

I do not work for Statcounter.com; in fact, I am the president
of MVP Internet Solutions. I am writing this article because I
feel that all webmaster should use this service. Please do not
take my word for it. Check them out, you will see.

src="http://www.statcounter.com/images/button2.gif" alt="Free
Web Stats" width="88" height="31" border="0">

Actually, the answer is yes……..and no. What is a reciprocal link? It is a link to a page that is linked back to ours. Of course, a non reciprocal link is a link from a page that we are not directly linked to.

Page rank is associated in some ways to linking. You see, the more links that point to our pages, the more important Google tm or other search engines think our page is. Non reciprocal links to our page (not on our page) add a lot more weight than reciprocal links. Search engines think that if a page is willing to link to ours and not get a link back, then our page must be important. They see it as a recommendation. But that´s not always true. The importance of the pages that link to ours is also accounted for. You can get 100 free hosting pages of your own and then link them to your special page with non reciprocal links and you wouldn’t get any change in rank; it is a “Zero * Zero = Zero” equation.

You have to get links from pages that rank well.
Then comes the other side of the question. Can I have any page link mine? And the answer is NO.
Search engines think of the web as a neighborhood. If you are linked to a good neighborhood then you must be good. If you are linked to a bad “hood” then you must be bad and they rank you.

So linking to pages with illegal content such as MP3’s, Warez, Hackers, etc. will soon get you a bad ranking. And probably your submission to the directories will not be accepted.

The other point of linking is ANCHOR TEXT.
Anchor text is the text of the hyperlink. Read this two examples:

Example 1

http://www.elmejorguia.com/Index_english.htm

Example 2
Free tools for webmasters

You inmediately see the difference. Although both links can point to the same page the way they are phrased is different. Not only does this make a difference in the way people read the link or the way the link gets their attention, but also when search engines “see” the link, they associate this words with your site and you climb ranks in those Keywords for any associated searchs.

Now you get the point?

Your links should have good anchor text that is related to the keywords that you want to exploit.

But search engines also see KEYWORD SPAM when they find too many links with the same phrasing beacuse it doesn’t seem natural They think that it is impossible that all webmasters would write the same words when linking your page. That means that you have to use slightly different phrases each time you get links to your page.

Last but not least, search engines do not see words inside pictures so image links and banners do not get you any ranking for any keyword.

Francisco Santander