Micro Niches Finder

Track Website Visitor Statistics to Improve SEO and Traffic

Most websites and/or servers come equipped with some sort of tracking statistics program installed by default these days, and there are many useful free statistics tools which can be used as well. When you are new to having a website, it may take some time to realize how useful and important these visitor statistics and logs can be.

In their most basic form, visitor logs can tell you simple things such as what type of Web browser your visitors use and what operating system is installed on their computer or browsing device. This can be useful because it allows you to check the look and functionality of your website on those browsers and operating systems.

For example, if you usually use Mozilla Firefox as your Web browser, but 90% of your visitors use Internet Explorer, then you should look at your site using IE to ensure it is looking and working correctly. Sometimes you will find that things are not lined up precisely, and in some cases you can even discover links and other functionality are not working either. This process is known as ensuring cross-browser compatibility and it can be greatly assisted by using a service such as Browsershots. By attending to these details you are able to fix any problems and dramatically improve the user experience, and thereby responsiveness, of 90% of your traffic.

Most visitor logs or statistics applications will also tell you how a visitor found your website and this can be a goldmine of useful information for you. When people visit your website from another location on the Web, it will show in your statistics program as a referrer. This allows you to know when new links are created to your website from other Web pages, and you can often visit those referring links to see if discussions are taking place about your website. This lets you join in the conversation if appropriate and leverage the social aspects of the Web.

Besides referring websites, visitor logs and statistics programs also provide a wealth of information about your search engine listings. When people use a search engine to find something and click through to your website, much of that information is shown in your analytics data. You can see how much traffic is coming from each search engine, and you can see the words and phrases people type in to find you.

Seeing the search terms used to find your website is where the real gold is for search engine optimization purposes, because you can use those keywords and phrases to optimize your website even further.

When you first build a site about asthma facts for example, you probably choose the top 10 to 20 keywords for that topic. By regularly consulting your visitor logs as time goes on, you may discover obscure words and phrases which are very relevant to your website, but which you may never have thought of on your own.

Researching Topics and Relevant Keywords

Whenever a website is built, its creator has a goal in mind. Before building a new website it is important to research and choose a topic that will accomplish whatever goal was chosen. For someone who intends to be a commercial Webmaster, that means choosing a topic which at least has the potential to make money.

Exactly how you plan to make money from your website is not overly important, because choosing the topic and related keywords is equally critical for all types of online business models. Never lose sight of this essential truth: if you cannot get enough targeted traffic to your website you will not be able to earn money from it, regardless of your monetization plan.

The aim of getting targeted traffic to a website starts with topic selection, and then quickly involves the nitty-gritty details of keyword selection. Topic selection is an important first step that many people unfortunately dismiss or take for granted. When you are building a website to make money, choosing a topic which lacks commercial possibilities is not going to help you achieve your goal. This fact will remain true no matter how many keywords you come up with. Microsoft adCenter Labs offers a tool for detecting the online commercial intention (OCI) of keywords, and this functionality is integrated into both Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder.

By this point, you should be crystal clear that you must select a topic with profit potential. Generally speaking, the more popular a topic is, the greater the market potential it possesses. However, in most cases the general popular topic is too broad to compete effectively if you only have modest resources available. Therefore, narrowing it down into subtopics (also referred to as niches or micro niches) is the next step. This is the stage where keyword research and selection come into play.

Choosing a broad topic such as health and beauty is a good first step for example, but unless you plan to invest years plus tens of thousands of dollars to make the website competitive, you will probably want to narrow things down a bit. You may instinctively choose one or the other - health or beauty - or you may start researching each branch of that topic to see which has the greater profit potential.

Suppose for the sake of this example you choose the health topic branch. However, even on its own health is still quite broad though, because it covers fitness, exercise, dieting, diseases, and much more. Within each of those sub-topics there are even more potential topics that you can choose to create a website about.

Keep Visitors on Your Website: Five Ways to Get Repeat Traffic

When you go to the trouble of optimizing your website to get plenty of traffic from search engines, it stands to reason that you would want to get the most out of that traffic, right? One way to do this is to turn first time visitors into repeat visitors. By getting new visitors to revisit your website regularly, you greatly improve your chance of increasing your website's revenue.

If you sell physical products for example, having one visitor come back time and time again for additional purchases increases the amount of money you make from that one visitor. Even if you earn income by displaying advertisements on your website instead, by having visitors come back for repeat visits, you increase the number of overall ads displayed. All other things being equal, this should lead to more advertising income being earned.

Getting repeat website visitors is not nearly as difficult as getting them the first time around, and here are five tips to help you achieve just that:

1. Add new content to your website regularly. Regardless of the type of website you are running, leaving it unchanged for too long will discourage people from visiting regularly. They want to see new content, fresh coupons, new products and so on and as long as you are providing something new or different each time, they will continue to revisit regularly.

2. Offer something extra or unique. Even straight content websites which run advertisements can sometimes have exclusive advertising offers. They can also have unique content which isn't available anywhere else online. Affiliate based websites can offer extra bonuses or tools that are not available anywhere else as well. Having additional value or exclusive offers ensures people have to come to your website for those specials.

3. Provide subscriber only specials. Start a newsletter or regular coupon mailing, and make those offers available to subscribers only. Then each time you send out a notice or special offer, those readers will revisit your website to take advantage of whatever discount or special you alerted them about.

4. Provide loyalty or VIP only offers. Loyalty offers can be in the form of a special coupon or discount and offered to people who have been subscribed to your mailing list for a given amount of time. These can also be used for people who have come back to visit your website a specific number of times.

VIP bonuses and specials are excellent to use for customers only. Anytime someone makes a purchase from you - no matter how small the purchase may be - add them to a private VIP mailing list. Then send exclusive specials to that list - and only that list - regularly.

Ten Tips to Improve Website Rankings

There are many things you can do which will help improve your website rankings in the search engine results pages. And naturally with improved rankings you will also increase the amount of traffic you get from search engine users too.

1. Choose a keyword rich, on topic domain name. The closer your domain is to the primary keyword phrase of your website, the more easily you will be able to rank for that phrase.

2. Create a useful, on topic website. Whether you sell products, offer a service, or just provide information, be sure to stay focused on the topic at hand, and create content which will help visitors find what they are looking for.

3. Use relevant keywords in the page titles and content. Researching popular keywords for your topic will allow you to know which words and phrases most people use when they are looking for content on that particular topic. Using those keywords and phrases in your page titles as well as the content on the page will help the search engines rank your page for them, and that will lead visitors to your website more readily.

4. Create good meta data for each page of your website. Meta data appears in the <head> section of an HTML document. Take time to provide meaningful entries for both the <title> tag and meta description on each page. By including this data the search engines will be able to more easily determine what your page is about and what keywords it should be ranked for.

5. Create keyword rich anchor text links within your site - i.e. internal links - to make navigating around very easy for visitors, and to make indexing much easier for search engine spiders.

6. Strive to get as many keyword rich anchor text links from other websites and domain names as possible - particularly those which are related in topic to your own website. The more links you have to your website from others, the more important and relevant the search engines will judge your website to be.

7. Acquire and create deep links to your website. Most websites are made up of more than just the home page, thus it looks more natural to have some links leading to specific sections, areas, and individual pages on your website.

Three Essential Steps for Website Success

There is more to building a good website than making sure you have the proper keywords, titles, meta tags, anchor text links and other search engine optimization features. In fact, a website is only useful if it is serving the purpose for which it was built. For most business websites, that means being profitable.

Having your website well optimized to accommodate frequent search engine spider visits and ranking well in the search results pages (SERPs) is an excellent first step. But since search engine spiders don't actually click advertising links or buy products and services, a website cannot be successful serving search engines alone.

The primary goal of a business website is to make money. It doesn't particularly matter if you make money selling products or services, showing advertisements, or generating leads. If your website is designed to make money then it must capture actual attention from real people.

Getting targeted people to your website is what search engine optimization is all about. If you sell blue widgets, then it wouldn't do you any good to have people visiting who are looking for red rings, right? Thus you optimize your site so that search engines will send people to you when they are looking for blue widgets.

Your job isn't done with just the search engine listing though. Your site could be listed on page one of the SERPs and yet receive few clicks from search engine users. You need to make sure your listing sells the click. This is performed by making sure you have an attention grabbing, relevant headline and where appropriate an engaging page description.

Having got a real live human to click on your listing, you then need to make sure you present them with an easy to use, attractive, focused website which addresses their needs. As Napoleon Hill author of Think and Grow Rich (an audio version is also available) pointed out, "it is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed."

This is where the three essential steps come into play.

1. Your website needs to be attractive to your target customer. If you are selling things to teenagers, the site will look and act much differently than one which sells to 60 year old grandmothers. To successfully execute this, it is vital that you know your audience. Learn as much as you can about them, so you can design and organize your website in ways they will understand and appreciate.

What is Keyword Density?

As you learn more about search engine optimization, you will often hear people referring to the keyword density of a Web page. Keyword density just tells you how often a given keyword or phrase is used in the text of a Web page.

Keyword density is measured as a percentage, for every 100 words you have written on a Web page, it indicates how many times a given keyword or phrase appears. If your keyword phrase shows up 5 times for every 100 words, then your keyword density is 5%.

Now, having this knowledge used to be considered very important for getting a Web page ranked well in search engines such as Google and Bing. The theory was, if you repeated a word often enough then that would convince the search engine algorithm that your page was very relevant to the topic and thus you would rank highly for that keyword or phrase. Unfortunately search engine optimization is never quite that cut and dried. The operative words here are "considered" and "theory", no-one ever managed to prove that keyword density existed as an algorithmic component.

However, not long after keyword density became a popular concept, many websites tried stuffing their keyword or phrase in as many times as they could. Whether the resulting Web page was readable by humans or not, was not seen as a priority by these short-sighted Webmasters. Naturally, the search engines could not tolerate this situation as it degraded their users' experience. Therefore, they reworked their algorithms to penalize the blatant keyword spam and the worst offenders found their websites deindexed for doing it.

As the SEO industry matured, some people decided that a certain amount of keyword density was what would let you rank well. So "experts" started advising people to build Web pages which had a keyword density of at least X% but no more than Y%. There were many variances in recommendations, but after a time the consensus was to have at least 3% but not more than 5% keyword density on each page. The problem with even those seemingly small percentages however, is that it's not always natural. Depending upon many factors - the overall topic being written about and the writer's style for example - keyword density can be all over the place. In some cases it would be less than 1% and in others it could be more than 10%. The correct lesson to draw from this is to always treat any consensus position with caution.

The Importance of Page Titles for SEO

When optimizing your website for good search engine rankings, you will see a great deal of success by putting carefully chosen, relevant titles on each of your website pages. Within any given website there are usually multiple pages and each of those pages should have a unique title.

In the context of search engine optimization, a Web page title is the text which is shown along the top of your web browser window when you are looking at a specific Web page. This page title is written in HTML code and it may or may not also be shown within the readable text of the page itself.

To create a title on your Web pages, you must put text into the HTML header area (between <head> and </head>) in the title tag. Any text inserted between <title> and </title> will show as the title for your Web page.

The text which displays as your page title is one of the most important factors for search engine optimization (SEO). Most search engines use this text to help determine what the page is about, and sometimes they will even use it to create the link for your search engine listing too.

This text is also sometimes used when someone creates a link to your website. If they do not manually intervene and create text of their own, many tools such as bookmarking buttons will automatically select the title of the page as the link anchor text. Therefore, careful selection of the title text can provide you with a rich opportunity to ensure the desired keyword or phrase is used.

When creating a Web page title it is important to try and use your primary keyword or phrase at the beginning of the title, or as close to the beginning as make sense. Do not try to repeat the words and phrases however, because this looks very unappealing and people will not click. This also looks spammy to many search engines and carries the potential risk of a sub-optimal listing, ranking penalties or outright deindexation.

If you have a website about essential meditation, then "essential meditation" would be the primary phrase to use in the title of your home page. If you have an internal page which is all about chakra meditation however, then you might want that page to have a title such as "Chakra Meditation Basics - Essential Meditation". This way the primary phrase for the chakra page is within the first few words of the title, and your overall site phrase is included as well.

If you have the words "essential meditation" first, and "chakra meditation basics" after that, then the search engines may rank that specific page better for essential meditation than for chakra meditation.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, comprises of two elements on page and off page optimization. This article covers each element in turn.

The primary goal of search engine optimization is to get your website - or a page within your website - to be in the number one spot on the search engine result pages (SERPs) when a specific word or phrase is typed into the search box. Broadly speaking, the higher your page or site ranks on the SERPs, the more visitors you stand to receive.

The first step to successful SEO begins before you even build your website. It is entirely possible to deliberately get ranked for search terms with no human traffic, but what would be the point? You must first choose a topic which is popular enough to be searched for by an appropriate number of people daily, weekly, or monthly. Once you have chosen a sufficiently popular topic, you must then build the site and optimize it well.

The best way to optimize your website when building it is to keep it on topic. If you have 100 pages all unrelated to each other topic-wise, it will be extremely difficult to rank any of them well. If instead you create 100 pages which are all tightly related to each other, you increase the chances of the site itself - and all the pages on that site - ranking very well for the topic and keywords you are targeting.

On page optimization is the process of making changes to each page of your website to ensure they rank well for the topic specific keywords or phrases you have chosen. By optimizing each page of your website, you increase the chances of one or more pages of your site ranking highly in the search engine result pages when someone is searching for your keyword or phrase.

The words you use on each page of your site, and the pages linked to and from each page, play an important role in modern search engine optimization success. Selecting specific keywords and phrases which are searched for often can help bring more traffic to your site. However, the more popular those words and phrases are, the more likely you are to find stiffer competition for them. In other words, thousands - or in the most competitive markets millions - of other websites may be trying to optimize for those words and phrases too.

You also have to tread carefully when using the keywords and phrases you have decided to target. All text on each individual page of your site will be read and analyzed by the search engines once they have been spidered. The text on your page is part of what helps the determination of where to rank the page in the search engine results.

Why Search Engines are Important for Your Website

Search engines are the method many people use to find your website. If your site is not listed in one or more search engines, there is a reduced chance of someone finding your products, your services, or your business. Search engines offer two types of listing: paid and organic.

Paid results, such as Google's AdWords program, are ranked on a combination of amount per click paid, number of user clicks the listing attracts and the Google-assigned quality score of the landing page. Organic results, also referred to as natural results, are decided by the search engines' closely-guarded internal algorithms.

It is estimated that 90% of Internet users look for things using a search engine such as Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. When they search for a keyword or phrase to find what they are looking for, they then select from the results that are displayed. Estimates vary, but it is believed that at least 80% of people using a search engine will click on one of the first three results displayed.

However in practice, things are not quite so clear cut. Click through rates can vary greatly depending on what is being searched for and what types of results are presented first. User behavior can be influenced by a compelling listing headline and body text. In many cases, results will depend on the various strengths and weaknesses of the competing results.

For example, if someone uses Google to search for the key phrase "natural dog food" then they may discover many shopping results on the first page. If they wanted to read reviews instead, or discover what ingredients natural dog food is made out of, they might continue on to other result pages to find the information they desire. If they are slightly more experienced and comfortable with using search engines, they may simply refine their search query to help return more appropriate result listings.

Regardless of how people use search engines, if your website is not listed for keywords and phrases relevant to its topic, you will not be able to take advantage of potential searchers since you will never be displayed to them.

Many webmasters mistakenly believe that there is only one search engine which matters: Google. This is because Google often sends 80% or more of their website visitors, thus they do not feel that it is important to bother with other search engines. However, there are actually three primary search engines and several dozen smaller ones which can send trickles of traffic too. These trickles of traffic can add up quite nicely, so it usually pays to not ignore smaller search engines.

An Introduction to Search Engines, Spiders & Web Crawlers

Getting your website listed in a major search engine is critical to the success of the site. Once your site is listed, people will be able to find it from all over the world when they search using keywords and phrases relevant to the topic of your site.

Web crawlers and search engine spiders are the automated part of a search engine. These are scripts and software programs which venture out onto websites automatically, finding new content and links as they go. You can try and force a web crawler to notice your new website by submitting that site directly to the search engine itself, but the best way to get listed is to have a link to your new site from an existing one.

Once a search engine spider has found a new website, it will continue to visit that site regularly. It looks for changes to existing pages, and it looks for new pages on the site as well. Since the search engine spider regularly revisits websites it knows about, anytime you add a link to an existing or new page on a site that has already been spidered, the search engine spider will notice the new link the next time it visits.

When a search engine spider notices new links it automatically follows them to see what is on the end of the link. If the link leads to a site the search engine has never spidered before, then it will pick up that new information and add it to its database. Once it is added to the database, also known as indexed, other software will categorize and list it in the search engine results pages (SERPs), and the spider will start visiting that new site regularly as well.

Since search engine spiders and web crawlers follow links, having a link to your new website from an existing one is the fastest way to get it indexed and ranked in search engine results pages.

Most modern search engine spiders and web crawlers will revisit websites based on how often new content appears to be added. When the site is a new discovery the spider will follow a default revisit schedule, but over time it will "learn" how often you add or change content. If it finds the content is changed rarely, it will revisit to check for updates much less often. If on the other hand, the site is regularly updated, then the spider will "learn" what the most common update schedule is and adjust its visiting schedule based on that.

Therefore if you tend to update your website monthly, the search engine spiders will eventually have you scheduled to check about once each month. However, if you add new content several times each day, then the search engine spiders will be more likely to start visiting your site at least once a day to index the new content you have added.