Can you tell how much traffic a website receives by looking at it?

When you’re evaluating a website for SEO, or if you’re looking at a website as a potential link partner, or from the view of a merchant on an affiliate network, you need to try to work out how successful that website. From an affiliate network’s point of view there’s not point wasting time with a website if it has no traffic. Equally, you don’t want to be building links on websites that have no power.

Yet, it’s not as easy as it first appears to gauge the success of a website.

Sure, you have the usual tells such as Google PageRank, domain age, number of backlinks indexed by Google and, if you want to waste five minutes, its Alexa ranking. But all of these could be deceiving.

For example, just because a website has a low Google PR, or even no PR at all, it doesn’t mean it’s not hugely successful. Google has been known to throw around PR penalties to website guilty of certain infractions on its rules, such as link selling. This means you could dismiss a website that has no PR, when it in fact is one of the most powerful websites out there.

Searching for backlinks in Google can be equally misleading as Google shows (more…)

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Improving conversions on your website

With 2009 almost over, many businesses will begin examining their advertising budgets for next year in relation to where they can cut costs, and where they need to increase spending.

Internet marketing is always one area that comes under scrutiny because you can clearly see how successful your PPC, SEO and email campaigns have been. You can track rises in rankings, traffic and conversions very easily using tools such as Google Analytics (or at least you should be), so the success, or comparative lack of success, of any Internet marketing campaign becomes apparent.

What some businesses will do however is to look at a lack of return on investment (ROI) and deem their Internet marketing a failure. They’ll see a lack of sales via their website, a lack of enquires, and believe that cutting costs is the way forward in the face of more profitable advertising methods.

If that is the case with your website, ask yourself why you have a low ROI.

Many people believe there is a direct correlation between the traffic your website receives and the money you can make from it. Unless your website earns money by page impressions, this is not the case. You need your website to convert, and high rankings for keywords and lots of Internet traffic from search engines is (more…)

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Google launches new AdSense Beta

Google is constantly making changes to its products and services, and barely a day goes by without some new feature being added to Analytics, Webmaster Tools or some other product.

However, the reporting interface for Google AdSense (the programme that allows webmasters to earn money from their websites) has barely changed for years. It’s become something of a comfy old blanket, with the only change of note in recent months being the switch to local currencies.

Google is about to change that as it has launched a new Beta test for its AdSense interface, inviting publishers to play around with their new features and offer feedback.

Google described its new interface as offering:

Comprehensive performance reports: View your daily stats in graph format, and gain insight into (more…)

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Megan Fox is the secret to SEO success

Megan Fox may have only emerged in recent years (largely due to the first Transformers movie from Michael Bay) but she has quickly established herself as something of an icon. She has been nicknamed ‘Mega Fox’ (shortly after ‘that scene’ from Transformers) and is one of the most photographed women in the world.

Megan Fox is also SEO gold and the secret to SEO success!

Seriously. Back before the Millennium bug never happened, the dotcom bubble was at its fullest and SEO was a ‘buzzword’ that nobody understood, it was the princess of pop ‘Britney Spears’ who dominated the search waves online. It was Britney’s fault (albeit indirectly) that the keywords meta tag was ditched by Google, when her name occupied a place in most people’s keywords tag in the hope of ranking for a search on her name.

The keywords tag may have gone (at least for Google) and Britney Spears may have become somewhat ‘overexposed’, but the allure of a beautiful woman still holds strong on the Internet, and today, in 2009, it is Megan Fox who guarantees (more…)

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Should I cut my Internet marketing budget during the recession?

Despite early optimism, the recession is likely to be with us for some time yet. This means that more people will be out of work, fewer people will be spending money and businesses need to cut back on their costs.

Cutting costs is important for businesses to survive the recession. This should not include your Internet marketing however. Internet marketing is unlike any other form of promotion or advertising, in that you can clearly see your return on investment. Using stats software such as (more…)

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7 uses for Alexa.com

Most people involved with Internet marketing have heard of Alexa.com, and most probably have used it once or twice (never usually three times though). Alexa is supposed to be a website that offers you statistics on your website, and other websites, relating to traffic levels and how popular a website is in relation to others on the Internet.

However, many people have fallen foul of these bold claims from Alexa and don’t realise that it can only record statistics from visitors who actually have the Alexa Toolbar installed on their browser… do you?

Of course, the people most likely to have the Alexa Toolbar installed are those who want to check their own stats, and because of the lack of widespread use of the Toolbar, simply installing it and accessing your own website a few times per day will (more…)

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Dodgy websites showing as referrers in analytics

When you run your own website and you engage in Internet marketing activities such as SEO or PPC, it’s crucially important that you check your website’s statistics regularly to see where your traffic is coming from and whether you’re getting a good ROI (return on investment) from your Internet marketing.

Google Analytics is a good tool for this because it gives you detailed stats and it’s free to use.

If you do check your stats regularly, one part of your stats you should particular attention to is your referrers. This is a list of the websites, or rather specific pages on those sites, that have sent you traffic. You will receive traffic from websites when that site has linked to you. It could be an advert you’re paid for, a link that you have built, a natural link because they found your site interesting or perhaps you’re even being discussed on a blog or forum.

However, sometimes you’ll see sites like the ones below listed as (more…)

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The Beatles are bigger than Jesus, FACT!

John Lennon once famously claimed that his band, The Beatles, were bigger than Jesus. His claim caused outrage in the Christian community, but now it seems as though Lennon’s rather arrogant claim has been proved correct, courtesy of Google Trends, and the digitally re-mastered release of the Beatles back catalogue.

As a result of the renewed interest in the Fab Four, more people searched on Google for information on The Beatles than they did for news about the son of god.