Tools to monitor your website

You can’t just put your web site on the net with right keywords and all the right touches and expect your traffic and ranking will remain constant. As the web is an ever-changing landscape, you have to keep track of your own web results like what is happening with the competition and also the best and highest ranked sites. There are many useful tools to help you find out what exactly is happening.

1. A tool which you can use to test your own website links or other web sites for broken links:
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

2. With this tool you can check search engines for the number of back links to your URL i.e. other web pages linking to your site:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/backlinks/

3. It sometimes becomes important to know where the servers of your hosting company are physically located. Because, some search engines like Google have the ability to filter search results based on their physical location called geotargeting. This could be used to determine why your site is showing in only a certain country. This link can also be used to research the country location of a particular competitor’s website:

Read the rest of this article at: The Great Ideazine

Entertain, Enlighten or Sell

As an experiment, a friend of mine subscribed to ten different opt-in email marketing lists to see which ones were the most effective. Many web sites and on-line businesses have resorted to sending promotional materials to people who have subscribed to them in an effort to boost their sales or traffic. Opt-in web sites marketers send newsletters, catalogs updates and other promotional materials to web site visitors who have agreed to be updated.

Any Internet user who is on the list will receive updates through emailed articles amd promotions. If a email or promotional material piques their interest they will go to the site to learn more or to purchase the product. For the web site operators or owners, this is a chance to remind their readers of the operator’s existence and to showcase their wares. Since numerous sites on the Internet offer the same products or services in one way or the other, the competition can get pretty rough and it is easy to be forgotten.

Back to my experimenting friend, he tried to find out which opt-in marketing strategies caused the reader to beg for more. Email ranged from the very simple to the extremely outlandish. The quality differences were easy to notice. Only a few have captured the concepts inherent in an effective opt-in marketing strategy. He dubbed them effective because he felt like he just couldn't wait to go their site and learn more. The most persuasive ones even got him reaching for his credit card before he realized he was only researching.