How Many back links do you have?

So how do you tell how many back links a site has? A good question. First thing you want to do is go to Yahoo.com rather than Google or MSN and search for the term “linkdomain:” and then the web site you want to inquire about using the Yahoo search box. This will take you to Yahoo’s Site Explorer site. For example linkdomain:http://blogtacticsandtips.blogspot.com/

When you do this for your site you will see two boxes at the top of the page. One will show the number of pages on your website, and the second will show the total number of inbound links to your site. These are your back links.

Now if you want to see what you need to do to outrank that pesky competitor of yours, it wouldn’t hurt to enter their domain name the same way and see how many pages they have on their site and particularly how many back links they have.

You might want to pay attention to who their back links are from, because there is a good chance you may be able to get back links from some of the same places.

Play around with with this and get your self high powered backlink.

links could rank higher.

Tips To Increase Alexa Rank

Alexa rank is important for a blog. Not only that Alexa Rank can help you to determine the popularity of a blog. Alexa rank is also a requirement to help you to earn some money on the internet.

Here are some tips to increase the alexa rank. Hopefully you will find it useful.

1. Install Alexa rank widget - Other than to show alexa ranking on your blog, by installing Alexa rank widget on your blog it will help Alexa.com to collect traffic data from your blog easier.
2. Install Alexa toolbar - Alexa ranking is calculated based on the number of visitors who install Alexa toolbar in their browser. Therefore, install Alexa toolbar in the browser is the most effective way to increase the alexa rank.
3. Frequently open your blog - Besides traffic, Alexa rank is also affected by the number of page views on blogs. Therefore, frequently to open your blog. Thus the number of page views of your blog will increase. To get better results, install the Alexa toolbar on your browser.
4. Claims your blog in the Alexa - By claiming your blog in Alexa it will be easier for Alexa to track and collect traffic data from your blog in order to speed up alexa rank update on your blog. To claim your blog on Alexa is easy enough. Follow these steps:

• Visit http://www.alexa.com
• If you have not sign up with Alexa please do so by click on Register. Once your account is established, log into your account Alexa.
• Click the Services menu and then on the new page click the Claim your site
• Enter your blog address. For example, http://blogtacticsandtips.blogspot.com/ then click Claim your site.
• After that you'll be given two methods to claim your site. In order to more easier use the 2nd method. Copy the meta tag code provided and paste it into your blog. Place just below the tag and save your template. If you have never installed Google and Yahoo sitemap on your blog then put it underneath.
• When you are finish, go back to Alexa.com and click on Verify my meta tags button Messages "Thanks,your blog has been verified" will be display as soon as you have do all the steps successfully.

Last but not least, Increase your blog traffic. As we know that Alexa rank is determined by the amount of traffic. The higher the blog traffic the better your alexa ranking will be. Therefore, do as many as SEO technique you know to increase traffic to your blog and don't forget to promote your blog.

Good luck!

The Importance of Referrer Logs

Referrer logging is used to allow web servers and websites to identify where people are visiting them either for promotional or security purposes. You can find out which search engine they used to find your site and whether your customer has come from a ‘linked site’. It is basically the URL of the previous webpage from which your link was followed.

By default, most hosting accounts don’t include referrer logs but may be subscribed for an extra monthly fee. If your web host does not provide a graphic report of your log files, you can still view the referrer logs for your website by logging into the host server using free or low-cost FTP software, like these:

• FTP Explorer: http://www.ftpx.com/
• LogMeIn: http://secure.logmein.com/dmcq/103/support.asp
• SmartFTP: http://www.smartftp.com/
• FTP Voyager: http://www.ftpvoyager.com/
  

The log file is available on your web server which can be download into your computer later. You can use a log analysis tool, like those mentioned below, to create a graphic report from your log files so that the files are easier to understand.

• Abacre Advanced Log Analyzer :http://www.abacre.com/ala/
• Referrer Soft : http://www.softplatz.com/software/referrer/
• Log Analyzer : http://www.loganalyzer.net

You can view the files using Word, Word Perfect, txt or WordPad files even if you don’t have the right tool. This information is very crucial to your business and marketing plans and is not advisable to neglect it.

In addition to identifying the search engine or linked site from where your visitor arrived, referrer logs can also tell you what keywords or keyword phrases your client used for searching.

As referrer information can sometimes violate privacy, some browsers allow the user to disable the sending of referrer information. Proxy and Firewall software can also filter out referrer information, to avoid leaking the location of private websites. This can result in other problems, as some servers block parts of their site to browsers that don't send the right referrer information, in an attempt to prevent deep linking or unauthorized use of bandwidth. Some proxy software gives the top-level address of the target site itself as the referrer, which prevents these problems and still not divulging the user's last visited site.

Since the referrer can easily be spoofed or faked, however, it is of limited use in this regard except on a casual basis.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site. Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%.

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

• Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.
• Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.
• Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.
• When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.
• Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

Try it and Good luck!

How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.


Consider all the things that matters as discuss above if you want to increase your page ranking. Work closely with the crawler. Good luck.

The Importance of Search Engines For Your Blog

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. When a topic is typed for search, nearly instantly, the search engine will sift through the millions of pages it has indexed about and present you with ones that match your topic. The searched matches are also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Remember that a prospective customer will probably only look at the first 2-3 listings in the search results. So it does matter where your website appears in the search engine ranking.

Further, they all use one of the top 6-7 search engines and these search engines attract more visitors to websites than anything else. So finally it all depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your site.

It is the Keywords that play an important role than any expensive online or offline advertising of your website.

It is found by surveys that a when customers want to find a website for information or to buy a product or service, they find their site in one of the following ways:-

• The first option is they find their site through a search engine.
• Secondly they find their site by clicking on a link from another website or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.
• Occasionally, they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an article.
  

Thus it’s obvious the the most popular way to find a site, by search engine, represents more than 90% of online users. In other words, only 10% of the people looking for a website will use methods other than search engines.

All search engines employ a ranking algorithm and one of the main rules in a ranking algorithm is to check the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Don’t forget that algorithms also give weightage to link population (number of web pages linking to your site). When performed by a qualified, experienced search engine optimization consultant, your site for high search engine rankings really does work, unless you have a lot of money and can afford to pay the expert.

With better knowledge of search engines and how they work, you can also do it on your own.