One way to use your time wisely is to keep an eye out on where visitors to your site are coming from. Knowing where your hits are coming from lets you channel your marketing resources to the most cost-effective advertising channels.

When you start out a new site, you’d probably want to try out a lot of different ways to market your site, including web directory submission, article writing, pay-per-click, social bookmarking, etc. Monitoring your website stats lets you know which of these methods is most effective and allows to focus your time and money those methods.

You can view your stats by logging into your hosting account. I like Awstats because it produces really neat charts and tables. If your hosting provider does not provide statistics for your site, you may use a third party service like Sitemeter.

Screenshot from cpanel:

One way to check to see if Google PageRanks are being updated is to check the PR of your site across the various Google datacenters. This is possible because the datacenters are out-of-sync with one another, and during an update, they may not show the same value.

Finally, Google appears to be updating its toolbar pageranks. If you go to the following tool and check any domain name with a PR of greater than 0, you’ll find that some datacenters report a PR 0 for that site.

http://livepr.raketforskning.com/

In the past the updating datacenters give you a glimpse of your future PR, but this time they show PR 0 for any domain you enter. So, there is no need to panic.

An important aspect of Adsense optimization for a blog is to make sure that the system delivers the right ads to your site. Showing ads that cater to your readers’ interests is essential to higher click-through rates and realizing your blog’s monetization potential.

Adsense delivers relevant contextual ads to a page insofar as it understands what the page is about. While a human being can easily get the gist a page just by taking a glance at it, computer algorithms are not quite as sophisticated.

If you blog on a number of unrelated topics, Adsense not be able to decipher what your blog is about. One way to avoid confusing Adsense is to stick to one topic for each blog. Set up multiple blogs for the other topics that you write about.

Another way is to limit the number of entries on your blog home and archive pages. I like to set my blogs to display at most five summaries or entries.

Another trick is to include your most relevant keywords in the title and first couple paragraphs of your entry. Use the “read more” tag (or similar feature) to prevent potentially confusing content from appearing on your front page.

You’ve probably used Alexa, but have you tried Quantcast? Like Alexa, Quantcast provides traffic rankings for millions of websites. But unlike Alexa, Quantcast does not rely on toolbar usage for data collection. Instead, Quantcast’s ratings are based on the analysis of usage data collected through “affiliations with partners, who include advertisers, publishers, ISPs and advertising networks”.

Comparing Alexa and Quantcast results for some of my sites, I’ve found Quantcast to be light years ahead of Alexa in terms of accuracy and usefulness. Quantcast not only ranks your site, but tells you how many unique visitors your site gets every month as well as where they come from, their gender, ethnicity, age group, income and other demographic information.

You can use the impressively detailed demographic information provided by Quantcast to identify who your visitors are and cater your site content to their needs. Alternatively, if you find that your site is not reaching the right audience, e.g. your gardening site is being visited mostly by teenagers, you can use the data to modify your marketing strategies so that it reaches those who are more likely to buy your products and services.

Below is a sample Quantcast output.

Quantcast will attempt to provide information on any site you query– the more established the site, the more information it will be able to provide. But to get the most accurate and detailed information on your site, you need to sign up to become a Quantcast publisher (for free). You will get a short, invisible Javascript code to insert into your webpage. No button or logo is displayed, unless you want to display your Quantcast ranking on your site.

Visit Quantcast.

- Static vs. Dynamic urls: does PageRank flow the same to both? What pitfalls should I avoid with dynamic urls?

- Can Sitemaps alert webmasters when their site has been hacked?

- Can I do geotargetting within Google’s Quality Guidelines?

- Myths: sites on the same server, IP, or including off-domain JavaScript

- Launching sites with millions of pages: how should I do it best?

- Google images: updates on the horizon, and current Google Images technology

There are currently over a hundred million websites on the internet competing for the eyeballs of visitors. How do you make your site stand out above the rest? The SEO and internet marketing gurus will repeat the old “content is king” mantra and will tell you to come up with something unique and original.

Fair enough. But how exactly does one go about doing this? What exactly is unique, original content? With the billions of pages on the net I think you’d be hard-pressed to to come up with something that is truly new and original that hasn’t been published or presented in some way by someone else already.

One way to make your content unique is add a personal touch to it. There are 5 billion people on the planet, and everyone is unique. What better way to render a site unique than to lend it a unique character that mirrors one’s own personality? The way we write, how we organize content, the words we choose, and even color scheme speaks to a site’s personality and imparts some degree of uniqueness and originality to it.

In real life a person can stand out by possessing one or more exceptional qualities, such as charisma, intelligence, creativity, trustworthiness, or whatever. These qualities can be played out through a site’s design and content to give it a certain personality.

When it comes to doing business online, people tend to be leery of whom they’re dealing with. The anonymity of the web does not mean it is easier to mislead and deceive people. Rather, it means that we must work harder to build trust and loyalty online. If you feel good about the products or services and are prepared to provide them in good faith, why not design your site in a way that exudes your confidence?

The personality of a site can attract visitors as well as build loyalty in the site. While the internet may seem like a faceless, nameless medium, but it’s the living, breathing people behind the websites that make things happen. As in real life, success in cyberspace hinges on one’s ability to forge positive personal relationships online. As a frequent shopper of online goods and services, I feel more comfortable dealing with an online company when I feel that I know the people behind it. So, it’s really not the websites themselves, but the people behind them, that influence my purchasing decisions.

There seems to be a lot of bad-mouthing about reciprocal linking nowadays by SEO “gurus” and amateurs alike, most notably in the various internet forums.

Reciprocal links, according to the naysayers, are virtually worthless because they supposedly do not help your search rankings or pass Google PageRanks to your site.

While no one really knows how search engines factor reciprocal links into search ranking calculations, let’s suppose that the naysayers are right– that is, reciprocal links provide no SEO benefits whatsoever. Should we then abandon the practice of reciprocal linking altogether?

Not a chance!

Reciprocal linking is a perfectly natural and legitimate traffic-building technique that predates the search engines themselves. To abandon the practice simply to satisfy certain fears or assumptions about how a search engine works is unnatural and potentially unethical. That search engines cannot handle reciprocal links properly reveals a shortcoming in their algorithms, not in the practice of reciprocal linking itself.

From my years of internet marketing experience, reciprocal links are an invaluable source of highly targeted direct traffic. Some of my sites are receiving hundreds of visitors a month through my link partners. Best of all, the traffic is all free. While I could have bought these clicks through various pay-per-click campaigns, which I do heavily anyway, I save hundreds of dollars a month just by trading links with relevant sites.

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What are the top 15 article directories? Here is my list.

Any objections? If so, please comment.