Internet Business Toolbox» google

Increasing Your Online Traffic

sugeng — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:25:55 +0000

This topic is always interesting and almost everyone will have his/her own theory. Regardless of all the noises, there are some very common things to do to increase your online visitors. Here are some methods to increase your online traffic.

1. Learn SEO techniques and apply them

There are many techniques you can learn and apply when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization). We are talking about how to make our website more appealing to search engine to index and more inviting to human visitors to leave their name and contact information.

2. Include web address in all your stationary and communications

It is a good practice to always include your web address everywhere, especially in all your stationary materials and communications. You need to present your URL in front of as many people as possible through all means. Printing the address on your name card is a good idea especially when you do a lot of name card exchanges with other people.

3. Create a blog to supplement the web presence

Having a blog to supplement your website is another way to increase traffic. The nature of blog is having regular postings. Search engines love sites perceived to be active and updated with fresh content regularly. Linking to your website from the blog will definitely increase your website ranking as they are seen to be related and relevant. With higher search engine ranking, you will definitely receive more visitors.

More information can be found here: What is Blogging , Blogging with Wordpress and Why Business Needs Blog.

4. Conduct online surveys and contests

You can also conduct online surveys and contest on your website. These are popular especially if the prizes are attractive. When people take part, they will tend to come back often just to see the progress and the result especially in contests. When your website design is attractive, your visitors will stay longer and explore more pages.

5. Provide online discount coupon download

For promotion purpose, your business will sometimes offer discount for products or services. Instead of using the normal way of discount, why don’t you use online discount coupon download? It will encourage people to visit your website and at the same time familiarize them with the site.

6. Provide special price for online order

Besides promotion, you can also provide special price for people ordering online. It will provide exactly similar effect to online discount coupon.

7. Start a regular newsletter with links back to your website

The much preferred way is to start a regular newsletter. By sending regular mailings, you will be perceived as expert in your topic and niche. By the time your readers are ready to buy, they will be more willing to purchase from you. Regular exposure will also encourage people to buy from you after about seven mailings. This is according to the statistics. Of course there are people who will buy earlier and there are some who will buy later.

8. Start a forum for your customers and visitors to interact with each other

Another method to gather people is to start a forum. People can join and interact with each other to familiarize with your products and services. For the forum to be successful, you need to moderate properly and correctly though. If not, it might turn into something you don’t really desire to have.

9. Get involved in social networking sites

From your involvement in social networking sites, you will also be able to increase traffic to your website. When you join the social networking sites, you will be given a profile page where you can enter your introduction and related websites. When people know you better, they will check your profile page. That is when they will click on your website and visit. Of course, when you are more or less known by other people, you can advertise indiscreetly. But, you have to remember not to do it too often as to flood the message stream with your advertisement. Example of social networking sites are Facebook, MySpace, etc.

10. Connect with microblogging

Microblogging is the trend now. Twitter is the trendsetter and its name is synonymous with microblogging. Similar to social networking site, you will be provided with profile page where you can put your web address. People will then look at your profile and visit your website.

11. Buy PPC

If you have the budget, you can also purchase PPC (pay-per-click). The popular and bigger network operators of PPC are Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. All there operate under a bid-based model. It means you bid for higher position with higher value of money for the CPC (cost-per-click).

These are just some ideas. Of course there are many more methods not covered here. I will be adding as and when I come across some good ideas to increase traffic. Please feel free to add on the comment section your ideas as well.

Efficiency with Google Docs

sugeng — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:00:33 +0000

Most people are familiar with the suite of Microsoft Office that consists of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and many others depending on the package purchased or pre-installed. For those who prefer open-source (free software), Open Office is the other common choice. There is another choice through Google. It is called Google Docs. We can achieve better efficiency with Google Docs.

We can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations in Google Docs. The look and feel are very much like Microsoft Office applications. You can create and edit the files or docs (as Google calls them) as per normal. On top of that, you can edit docs from anywhere and collaborate with others. With collaboration, we can share the document and edit the docs together with others online. It is just like sharing whiteboard where everyone’s changes are updated real time.

Google Docs also provides ideas for teachers in Docs for Teacher. You can find it in Google Docs Help area. There are few suggestions provided on how best to use Google Docs in education. You can also find Google Docs Help Forum in the help area. This forum has all the answers to questions the users have. Of course you can join the Google Docs Help Group that will send emails when there are questions and updates. There are also templates available for the Docs at template gallery.

Since Google Docs is using existing Google account login, if you already have account registered with Google, you don’t have to register again. You just need to activate Google Docs and you are ready to use the features.

There is a new feature of Google Docs that allows it to work offline. This is very convenient when you need to work offline. Google Docs will use the copy stored in local hard drive and synchronize the content when you go online again. You can access Google Docs offline you need to enable it first by installing Gears for Google Docs. It is easy to do. Just click on the Offline link in the upper-right corner of your Docs list. When you see the following dialogue box, click the Get Google Gears now button. To access Google Docs offline, just point your browser to http://docs.google.com.

You can get more information from Google Docs Help area.

Understanding Website Traffic

sugeng — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:00:27 +0000

Website traffic is crucial. Understanding website traffic is even more crucial. Traffic is an important part of business website or blogs. Traffic information is very important to the success of website marketing program. Your business will only prosper when you have a flow of people visiting your website daily. You need to know about how many came, who are visiting, where the people are from, who referred the people and when they came. You need all the information to determine how successful the marketing program, how best to do fine-tuning and to achieve better traffic result. There are many traffic tools available over the internet. Some are free and others are not. They also differ in terms of efficiency and depth of reports available.

Besides having suitable traffic tools, you also need to understand web traffic analysis based on the report from the tools. Looking at the output of any web traffic tools, you need to understand the terms being used. There are three measurements that are normally used with web site traffic. They are hits, pages and visits.

Hits can be a big number but not really meaningful. It can be misleading. Hits are calculated according to how many times all the components of a single page are requested. A single web page may require few requests as it may contain few elements each calculated separately. Each element requires one request. For blogs, since there could be many elements on one web site, the hits for one single page request can be quite high. Examples of page element are the HTML page itself, external style sheets, external JavaScript files and each graphic image.

Pages are also called page views. This is more meaningful as it counts the actual single page display. A page contains many elements and the page view should only count that as one to be accurate. We don’t really care how many times an element is requested, but we are very interested in knowing how many times a page is displayed. Page view is also called unique page view.

Visits are even more current. It is a traffic number that counts the visit by a unique visitor. It is tied to the ability to distinguish between different people visiting your web site at the same time. A visit is usually considered as one or more page views from a unique user within an hour. If another visit is done after more than one hour, it would be counted as another visit.

If you host your own web sites, you may have access to the web log files. A log file records every hit registered by the web server. These data are raw and unfiltered. It is not easy to read and understand the log files. However the information can be very useful especially in understanding the nature of traffic visiting your web site. It is a worthwhile effort learning to read traffic log files.

Traffic tools can be installed locally or hosted externally (web-based) by third party. Examples of locally installed tools are The Webalizer, Urchin (from Google), AWStats and WebTrends. Your web host might have one or more of these already available. Visit the links to learn more about how to better utilize the tools and understand the reports.

Examples of web-based tools are Site Meter, StatCounter and Google Analytics. Those are free of charge. If you need more variety of website traffice tools, here are two sites that have a collection of many such tools available: Analytics Toolbox: 50+ Ways to Track Website Traffic by Mashable and Track Website Traffic: 40+ Great Tools by Technology Magazine.

SEO is Search Engine Optimization

sugeng — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:36:24 +0000

SEO is very commonly heard when we talk about internet marketing. Search engine optimization refers to the process of improving volume and quality of traffic visiting a website from search engines. This type of traffic is achieved through the normal search results of the search engine. It is also called organic or algorithmic traffic. Optimization part of SEO refers to the efforts done by webmasters to improve the ranking of the search engine results with the understanding that sites with higher ranking will receive more visitors and consequently more profitable.

Search engine optimization considers how search engines work and how people search. SEO tries to achieve the best search engine result by editing the content and html codes so that search engines will rank the page higher based on the selected keywords and tags. There are many optimization methods discovered and devised by the SEO experts. In parallel, the search engines are also forever adjusting and optimizing the search criteria to better serve the searching community who is the search engine’s customers. To have better understanding of search engine algorithm, here is the link to download Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. Google also has a very informative page on Search Engine Optimization.

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SEO Technique

SEO is not an easy process. It involves many tedious tasks. The simplest among all is to focus on certain related keywords on your page. You need to include the keywords in the title, the first few paragraphs and also on the meta tag of the article.

Another popular topic on SEO is the page ranking on the search engines organic search results. Organic here means that the search result is displayed by the search engine based on the ranking determined by the predefined algorithm. It is not something that is purchased.

Hyperlink analysis is also covered in SEO. It involves the analysis of the links from and to the particular page. Some factors considered are the relevancy of the links and the quality of the pages linked. It is worth paying attention not to link to pages considered as link spam sites and also link farm sites.

Most search engines are using crawlers to index the sites. Crawlers refer to automatic programs sent by search engines to search for new sites and index the pages. There are certain criteria used the search engines to index the pages as not all pages will be indexed with the same weight.

White Hat vs Black Hat

There are generally two categories of SEO techniques. White hat refers to techniques recommended by search engines as part of good design. Black hat refers to techniques the search engines do not approve. White hat confirms to the search engines guidelines, involves no deception and tend to produce long-term results and effects. Black hat will eventually be discovered by the search engines and either banned temporarily or permanents by the search engines when they are discovered.

White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines. It helps to make content that is easily accessible to the spiders, not trying to trick the algorithm of the search engines. White hat SEO is in many ways similar or even close to web development that promotes accessibility.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. There are many methods which are best not mentioned here. When you think that your content and page structure do not look normal, it is high chance that you might have inadvertently employed black hat techniques. Either you modify your content and structure or risk being banned by the search engines. I guess the answer is very obvious here.

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In Conclusion

It is a good idea to use tools to do search engine optimization.There are many freely available tools on the internet. Here are four sites that provide optimization tools. SEO Tools provides many useful tools and tutorials for your SEO needs. Using the tools provided you can optimize your keywords based on search analytics, link analysis and ranking checkers. If you are the techie type, SEO Chat provides a very comprehensive list of tools that include everything related to adsense, Alexa, meta, robots and many other things. 136 SEO Tools as the name implies has a collection of 136 SEO tools. SEOToolSet has a collection of useful tools including SEO toolbar and other tools.

Additionally, Ultimate SEO Tool by Googleranking provides analysis of your frequently used keywords against Google rankings. You will be able to see how you fare based on Google search criteria. Another useful tool is SEO Tool by SEOBugs. It provides analysis on various aspects of your website based on certain criterias and also provides suggestions on how to better improve the SEO.

While everyone focuses a lot on how to do SEO correctly, we also need to be aware of what not to do. This article on Top 10 SEO Mistakes offers a very intuitive insight on common sense things that we need to avoid. Most of the time people just rush through to produce articles especially in blogoshpere when consistency in timing for in article production is a constant weekly if not daily pressure. Bloggers just forget about the quality and commit most of the mistakes producing adverse effect on the search engine optimization.

The best SEO tip I can offer here is just to avoid all the mistakes presented in the article. By doing this, you are already half-way through to win the race to the top of search engine organic or natural search results.

Good luck to your SEO effort. You are always welcome to share your best tips and sites on this topic.