| SEO utility for software developers |
WEBSITE SEARCH ENGINE RANKING
The placement of your Web site in search engines is important. Here we collect a lot of useful resources for submitting and tracking your Web site position in the engines. First of all you can read the following ten tips for improving your ranking, courtesy of Dave Collins, President, Shareware Promotions. 1) WATCH YOUR HEAD - pay careful attention to the contents of your document HEAD. The META TAGS are important, and so is your <TITLE>. Make sure the <TITLE> is the first thing in the head - many WYSIWYG editors like to put it at the end.. 2) TAG THOSE IMAGES - make sure that every single graphic image on the page has an ALT tag, and that the text is search-engine friendly. Some engines pay attention to these - don't let them down! 3) REGULAR MAINTENANCE - keep your site clean, and sweep away those dead links. Update the content from time to time - a stale site impresses no one. Search-engines included. 4) CONTENT IS KING - avoid the "tricks" and go for legitimate content. Set your page up correctly and a few hundred words of solid content will do more than any secret techniques. Leave the tricks to the magicians. 5) BE GOOD - don't resubmit your Web site every 2 days, and don't use "clever" keywords like Britney to bring traffic to your site. Unless of course your site is in fact a Britney site... 6) KNOW YOUR RULES - each search engine has an explanation of how and what to submit; it's in your interest to find this info. Some sites only need your root page, while others need more of a helping hand. It's all there. 7) SET TIME ASIDE - there isn't a Web site out there that can't benefit from doing better on the search engines. Set aside at least an hour a week to polish your site and submit to the engines. No such thing as wasted time here. 8) NO SHORTCUTS - don't leave the submissions to a $15-for-a-zillion-sites "business"; it's worth doing properly, by hand. Ever heard of a 100% efficient automated machine? 9) STAY IN TOUCH - the rules and routines for the engines change from time to time, and keeping on top of the latest news is a good idea. When a site announces that from a certain date they'll be charging for new submissions, don't you want to know about it? If the engines have a newsletter - join it. Good, useful and free information is the nicest of all.... 10) DO IT NOW - search engine work is one of those things that most people "mean to get round to" some day. If you can increase the number of visitors to your site by 200 people each day, and 1% of these will buy your software, then what are you waiting for? Search engine submission / tracking useful links... Server Logs Statisitics - Web Traffic DataThough I am aware of breaking out from the traditional approach to the use of Web server statistics, but I would strongly suggest independent publishers, reporters, bloggers and online journalists of all kinds, to make (a representative sample) of their log server stats publicly available. Log server statistics are files that are automatically created on the Web server hosting your site and documenting in a high level of technical detail each and every access to your site. My recommendation is: Make it completely transparent for everyone to see how well you are doing. The more transparent you are, the more credible your information will be. Some of you may correctly note that it would be quite easy for some unscrupolous webmasters to easily fake some of their own traffic statistics. While this may be certainly true, it also provides an interesting opportunity for vendors of log server analysis and live tracking software to start providing a "certified" offerings to their package, allowing publication of somewhat more trustworthy data under the control/verification of a third-party entity. So, while it may be hard to find public traffic statistics for a while still, look for official (or unofficial) traffic data whenever you can. If it is not available publicly, request access to the non-public data. If the data is locked behind a secure account ask them to provide you with a signed screenshot set ("signed" meaning that they will certify their screenshots not to have been tampered digitally). But do look at server logs data if you want to have the real story on any site. These are the important indicators, within Web site traffic statistics, to look for: Number of daily unique visitors. This is a specific value that says a lot about any site popularity and traffic. Don't be confused by the statistic called "hit". Consider "hits" useless. No value whatsoever is assessing the credibility and authority of a Web site. If you see a site bragging about the number of "hits" it has, you are looking at a non-credible site. Period.
Page Views. This critical indicator says how many page views your site has received. Since one visitor can view multiple pages, it is important to understand whether the site prompts the user for extra reading or not.
Pages per visitor. This is the other critical statistical factor to find about. How many pages each visitor to that site gets to see? Time on site. Probably indispensable as the two other indicators above the time on site shows clearly if the visitors of a certain site spend serious time on it or are just passers-by realizing that this is not the site for them.
Repeat visitors. Though very hard to compute with precision this indicator offers valuable feedback about the stickiness factor of any site by showing how large is the percentage of Web visitors returning for multiple visits.
One alternative way to obtain traffic data from sites that do not wish to share such information is to utilize services like Blogads, which rely on gathering and sharing page views statistics of their customer sites to make their advertising agency services more valuable and trusted. Blogads Blogads is an ad brokering clearinghouse for bloggers and independent sites. Through its service it is possible to determine some useful reference data about the traffic of any of the Web site that runs blogads. Since blogads is quite popular and established among many blog sites it is possible to get good traffic references for a large number of sites. Since web site publishers need to insert a short code inside their web pages to run the Blogads service, it is next to automatic (just like for Google Adsense) for Blogads to know how many times any Web page running its code has been viewed. Intelligently Blogads makes this data accessible to the public, and as a matter of fact it is one of the driving criteria for how advertisers select their ideal promotion outlets when using Blogads. Please see: http://www.blogads.com/order_html
It should be noted that since site owners may not run blogads on all the pages of their sites, the statistics being shown on Blogads reflect only a minimum possible number of page views but possibly never the complete absolute number. Blogads also provides advertising performance indicators to its publishing and advertising customers (clickthrough ratio on ads), but this data is not publicly accessible. Advertising Performance - Clickthrough RatioAdvertising performance is a very valuable indicator of a Web site credibility as it provides a tangible reference of how much its readers trust the information, products and services being offered through it. Unfortunately this type of information is generally kept under tabs by both advertising agencies and publishers. It would be very valuable for Web site owners to publish publicly this information in ways that cannot be counterfeited. A certified data dump from Google, or other provider would be a welcome addition to a site credibility public set of indicators. Where possible request the sharing of this advertising performance information for any site for which you wish to evaluate overall effectiveness and "traction”. Google AdSense, which is a service provided by Google, allowing independent sites to run text-only contextual ads next to their articles. Google AdSense provides detailed performance statistics to Web site owners running it.
Similar programs offer equivalent information to both advertisers and publishers, though this information remains generally highly guarded. If you, as I recommend, intend to publish or share such advertising performance information on your Web site, I strongly advise to first inform and obtain a written permission from your advertising partners. Other Popularity and Authority IndicatorsNewsletter - Mailing List Size Another major indicator of a site popularity is the size (and quality) of its mailing list. For mailing list size is generally intended the number of subscribers to a newsletter or other email-based periodical publication that the web site publishes. Hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands. What is the number of people who has chosen to subscribe to your email-based news reports? The larger the size and the more frequent the publication, the higher the level of popularity, authority and credibility achieved by that site. Unfortunately this data is not generally shared or published. It is my recommendation that Web publishers state their effective circulation without censorship and by always providing the source reference of that data, if not a visual proof or better yet a certified audited report. There are multiple free services and tools that used together may provide additional sets of data to compute the degree of credibility, authority and popularity of one or more Web sites. These include: Alexa ranking Though Alexa results can not be trusted as absolute measurements of a site popularity, credibility or rank, they can be very useful in checking overall trends and indicative evaluations of a site performance over time. It is well know that Alexa results can be easily faked and influenced with cheap techniques. The statistical results appearing in Alexa are derived from the surfing patterns of all those users who have installed the Alexa toolbar. Nonetheless such Alexa toolbar users maybe over ten millions, they remain a very limited audience sample, strongly slanted to represent the US-based Web geek demographic that best represent Alexa users: online marketing specialists, web site owners, webmasters fanatically interested in the ranking and visibility of their sites.
"In addition to the biases above, the Alexa user base is only a sample of the Internet population, and sites with relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa due to the statistical limitations of the sample. Alexa's data come from a large sample of several million Alexa Toolbar users; however, this is not large enough to accurately determine the rankings of sites with fewer than roughly 1,000 total monthly visitors. Generally, Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant. Conversely, the more traffic a site receives (the closer it gets to the number 1 position), the more reliable its Traffic Ranking becomes." Source:About the Alexa Traffic Rankings http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/traffic_learn_more.html Alexa traffic ranking is really only relatively good for the top 50,000 websites. It is also a good pattern indicator for any site general trends. Where Alexa can be useful on a busy site is for hunting related sites and seeing patterns. How important is Alexa? http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=4562 Alexa.com, how valuable is this? http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum16/907.htm "Alexa is trying to expand the use of its toolbar (and thus the accuracy of its statistics)." "Of course Alexa isn`t a tool to get the world ranking on most visited sites accurat, completly agree with that, however I think it has some accuracy if you compare sites that are in similar or the same business." "Alexa Web Search is a funny topic. Amusing, in fact. Alexa, despite the fact that it has a very small user base, takes it upon itself to issue"traffic rankings". These lopsided and absurdly inaccurate traffic rankings in themselves are enough to warrant a chuckle; but this topic gets much funnier when you see CEO's of affiliate marketing corporations and SEO amatuers brag about their Alexa traffic rankings." "Alexa measures Web site use based on the traffic patterns of those who have installed and use the Alexa toolbar. Since probably 80-90% of Web surfers have probably never heard of Alexa, it's not something you can use as a marketing tool." Find out more by yourself starting from here: http://www.google.com/search?q=alexa+accuracy&hl=it&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&start=10&sa=N Yahoo Web Rank http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/companion/webrank In a move that may further thrill the professionals working in SEO and SEM areas, Yahoo has quitely rolled out something very similar to the famous Google PageRank. This is a system that allows Yahoo to calculate the rank of any Web site by leveraging the browsing habits when using the new Yahoo!'s Web Rank Toolbar. The ranking mechanism places any individual Web site on a popularity scale going from 1 to 10 based on the number of links pointing to that site and other factors Yahoo takes into account. For those who wish not to install the new Yahoo Web Rank Toolbar, or that do not have MSIE installed as their default browser, Yahoo Web Rank data can also be accessed by by going to http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/webrank/ (March 29th 2004 - Source: Yahoo's Own PageRank: Web Rank - RG News) Given the very recent introduction of this tool, its relatively limited adoption and the results I have seen during my ongoing tests, I would not consider this a critical authority indicator, made exception for the top 100,000 sites, for which, given enough time, the statistical data will provide some useful reference information. Promising. Link Appeal http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-appeal.shtml Link Appeal calculates the desirability rating of having a link on the url you specify. This calculation includes four factors: a) Google PageRank b) number of outbound links c) the overall percentage of links to html d) Alexa traffic ranking Link appeal calculates an overall score (1-10) based on the above factors.
Ranking Ranking offers a similar service to Alexa attempting to provide absolute ranking, page views, visitors, links and authority value to each and every site measured. Unfortunately results are far from being anything I would rely on. Ranking.com utilizes an approach similar to Alexa's by polling the browsing behaviour of all users of the Browser Accelerator software/toolbar sold by a sister company (both are woned by EMERgency24 Inc.). The overall polling sample is a group made of under a million users, hardly providing any effective statistical relevance to the data reported on a global Internet scale. Unreliable. Use only as a testing reference or to measure Top 10,000 performers. Popularity, Authority And Credibility In The BlogosphereAlso inside the blogosphere there are multiple services which greatly facilitate the measurement of authority of and popularity of any blog site. By utilizing link popularity, the number of citations on other sites and the number of trackbacks from other blogs. Far from being very precise in absolute terms, some of these indicators offer a good, relative measure, of a blog popularity, authority and consequent credibility in its field. These include: Technorati Technorati provides the most respected and comprehensive authority index about the blogosphere. Technorati allows easy assessment of any weblog popularity/authority by providing a uniquely valuable statistical census of the blogosphere in near-real-time. By querying the Technorati search interface with the URL of a weblog one is provided with the following information: a) the number of blogs linking a specified blog b) the total number of links arriving to that blog from the previous blogs (When it works), Technorati provides an outstanding authority indicator for any active Weblog on the Internet.
PubSub Linkranks http://www.pubsub.com/linkranks.php Link ranks are a way of measuring the strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in weblogs. From this data is possible to extract valuable information supporting the ranking of blog sites according to their link popularity and value. Link ranks takes into consideration scores for each linking site; domains are then scored also with reference to the values of the sites that link to them. The theory is basically that these are the links you're most likely to click on, if you read a weblog at random. Unlike Google's PageRank system, link ranks are not iterative. Rather, PubSub bases Link ranks on a simple formula that only looks at local links - links which are within one or two steps of any target site. Also important to note is that Link ranks only looks at links which are in weblog entries - and not those that may appear on the side bars or inside so-called blogrolls. To calculate link ranks, PubSub generates a link score for each domain. Link scores are calculated in three steps: first, a point value is found for every site that links to other sites. Second, the point values are used to generate link scores for each domain. Finally, the daily scores are weighted over a fixed period to arrive at an aggregate score for the site - this ensures that more recent links are given more value than older links. Interesting. Promising.
Daypop Blogstats http://www.daypop.com/blogstats The DayPop Blogstats facility shows a blog's ranking in terms of Daypop's citation scoring. It also shows similar weblogs based on link patterns (only the Top 1000 blogs ranked by Citations and Daypop Sponsors' Blogs have data for Similar Blogs). A new service, with some interesting features, but too little documentation. To be followed. (Unfortunately scoring criteria are not explained on the site.)
Backlinks with TouchGraph GoogleBrowser http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser_Backlinks.html Few people know that the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser offers a fascinating visual view of the backlinks to any Web site. Fascinating for serendipitous exploration, visual comparisons and experimental research. Mostly unusable for effective statistical reference and authority assessment. Tactical usefulness. Exploratory and research use.
There are other similar services from Feedster (Links), Blogstreet (Visual Neighborhood) and others, but none seems to be working reliably as of this writing. SEO articles index
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