Web Design Discussion

How to Analyze Your Web Site Using Google’s Webmaster Tools

Are you keeping track of how many visitors your web site is receiving and where they are coming from? If not, try using the free webmaster tools from Google.

Benefits of Google Website Traffic Analysis Tool

1. Home page crawl

Google provides the exact date Googlebot (Google’s search engine) last successfully accessed your home page.

2. Crawl Stats

“These statistics provide distribution information for pages we have crawled for our google.com index. The PageRank distribution reflects all crawled pages in your site, not just the home page”.

3. Page analysis

These statistics show you how the Googlebot sees your site. Google provides a table of all the external links to your site and what keyword phrases are used. If you click on a word or phrase in the external links a table shows the variations of the keyword phrase being used.

The table displayed for my web site showed 200 external links with their accompanying keyword phrases. Google does not show all the external links to your web site.

4. Web crawl errors

These pages list URLs from your site that Googlebot had trouble crawling. Here are the errors that are checked:

HTTP errors
Not found
URLs not followed
URLs restricted by robots.txt
URLs timed out
Unreachable URLs

5. Index status

Provides statistics of pages from your site that are included in Google’s index.

Here’s a sample of the pages indexed by Google of my site:

Operator - Description - Result
site - Indexed pages in your site - site:www.isitebuild.com
link - Pages that link to your site’s front page - link:www.isitebuild.com
cache - The current cache of your site - cache:www.isitebuild.com
info - Information we have about your site - info:www.isitebuild.com
related - Pages that are similar to your site - related:www.isitebuild.com

Conclusion

Using a website traffic analysis tool will help you to pinpoint errors in your site’s design, find what sites are linking to yours, and how Google is indexing your web pages. Correcting these website errors will ultimately improve your site’s performance by boosting your web traffic.

Many site owners participate in link exchange campaigns to boost their link popularity. This can be very time consuming because you need to continually contact other site owners and wait for their response. Often you won’t get any response and therefore waste your precious time. Incorporating anchor text in your link building campaign will save you time because it provides high quality backlinks to your web site.

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As a professional web designer I often receive documents from clients that I can’t open. Recently I received a .docx file from a client who was using a new computer with MS Office 2007 installed. I have MS Word 2002 installed on my own computer so I was unable to open the Office 2007 document.

The .docx format is not compatible with older versions of Microsoft Word or with alternative operating systems like Linux or Mac OS X. It is also not compatible with other word processing applications like OpenOffice, Lotus 123, or NeoOffice.

How to convert .docx files to a readable format

Docx-converter.com converts a Microsoft Office .docx file into a simple html file. It strips out some of the formatting, but now supports bold, italic, and underlined text. Left, right, center, and justified alignment. Unicode characters, tables etc.

Other methods of converting .docx files

Rename the .docx file (after downloading) and change the extension from DOCX to ZIP. The icon associated with the file changes. Windows will now see it as a ZIP archive instead of a Word document. You can open the contents with WinZip, WinRAR, PKZIP, or any other ZIP compression tool.

The actual content of the document is contained in the document.xml file. You can change the contents of the file by editing the XML file directly with notepad, drop it back into the ZIP container, then change its extension from ZIP to DOCX. Now you have made the change to your docx file.

Resources

Exploring the XML File Formats

DOCX CONVERTER

To read Part 1 please visit Link Popularity - Types of Links, Their Purpose and How to Get Them

3. Outgoing Links (also known as outbound links)

These are links that only go to sites outside of your own. Their purpose is to provide more information to visitors that come to your site. Don’t link to sites unrelated to your own as Google may view it as artificially inflating your site to achieve high rankings.

Here’s an excerpt from Goggle’s Webmaster Guidelines regarding reciprocal link exchanges:

“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or Page Rank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links”.

Here’s an example of how to contact a site owner to exchange links:

If you have a web page about “what you need for camping”, then include links to sites that have your favorite local camping areas. Your visitors will love you for it and may even link to this page from their web site because you offered comprehensive and valuable information about camping.

4. Internal Links

These are links contained with your site’s architecture. When building your navigation structure, make sure you link all internal pages to your home page. Use the full URL (i.e. http://www.domain.com/page.html) in your links. Internal pages linking back to your home page viewed as backlinks to your site. This will contribute to your site’s rankings.

Are you confused about all the different types of links you need to acquire to boost the link popularity of your web site? Let me endeavor to straighten this out by discussing the purpose and definition of each type of link and how to get it.

Purpose of Link Building

Boost search engine rankings
Increase web site traffic
Improve page rank
Quick and deep indexing of web pages
Create multiple entry points to your web site

Read Top 10 Benefits of Link Building

Types of Links

1. Non-Reciprocal Links (often called incoming links, backlinks, inbound links, inlinks, inward links)

These are incoming links pointing to your website which do not require a link to be exchanged. The number and quality of incoming links determines the popularity of your web site in the search engines.

A couple of ways to get backlinks is submitting your site to directories or writing articles. You can include a non-reciprocal link in the resource box of your article.

2. Reciprocal Links (also known as “link swaps”, “link exchanges” and “link partners”)

This is when you exchange links with another web site. You both agree to link to each other.
The number and quality of the sites that link to yours determine your rankings. It’s imperative to only exchange links with sites related to your own.

One method to find reciprocal links is to contact site owners by first placing a link to their site on your own site. Mention you have already done this in your email to them and where the link is located, and then ask the site owner to do the same for your site. If they don’t respond after contacting them 3 times, remove their link and look for another.

It can be a slow and laborious process but with persistence it pays off by getting better rankings and increasing your sales.

Read Top 10 Benefits of Link Popularity Building - Part I

Part 2

6. Multiple entry points

Building links to other pages within your web site creates multiple points for visitors to enter your web site. They will naturally visit the other pages of your site by following your navigation links.

7. Get listed in paid search engines

Most search engines don’t allow you to get listed without paying a fee. Building links to other pages within your web site is a great method to also get listed in the paid search engines because they simply follow a link from another site linked to yours.

8. Index dynamic web pages

It’s not easy for search engines to index dynamic pages. Web pages that get indexed usually end with .htm .html .shtml .php .pdf Dynamic pages usually end with a question mark or contain a lot of numbers. Using proper link building strategies will allow dynamic pages to be indexed and also gain high rankings.

9. Stay ahead of your competition

Targeting specific keywords and/or keyword phrases during your link building campaign, will keep you ahead of your competition. Therefore it’s imperative to be persistent in getting a high number of quality links pointing to your web site.

10. Boost web traffic, visitors and sales

High traffic sites that point to your site help to increase the number of visitors coming to your own web site. It can be compared to having your shop in a mall. Visitors roaming the mall will also visit your shop because it is located in a high traffic area.

Some visitors from high traffic sites will be redirected to your site, thus increasing your overall traffic and visitors. If your web copy is enticing enough for your visitors, the increased traffic will generate more sales.

Link popularity refers to the number and quality of incoming links to your web site. Your site’s rankings will increase in the search engines based on the number of links pointing to your site from other related sites. Most site owners view this as the only benefit of link popularity however there are other benefits discussed below.

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Link Popularity is the single biggest factor search engines used to rank web sites. If you are not building links to your site, then don’t expect your rankings to improve.

What is Link Popularity?

This refers to the quantity and quality of links pointing to your web site. The more outside links that point to your own site the greater the visibility of your own site.

For example, say your site is about the iPhone. You write an incredible article about it that is immediately picked up by major news organizations, bloggers and 1000s of other site owners, that all link to your site for people to read the article.

Your site potentially will rocket to No 1 in the search engines because it gained tremendous link popularity from 1000s of high ranking sites linking to your own site.

According to Google’s webmaster guidelines

“Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Conclusion

When building links to your web site, make sure they are relevant to your subject matter (don’t get links from unrelated sites ie gambling, etc), include link building in your web site marketing plan and do it on a consistent basis. If you are persistent, you will see a steady improvement of your site’s rankings across most of the major search engines.

The search engines are getting more sophisticated
with their algorithims because they want to return the
best results possible to people searching for information.

If I don’t find what I am looking for on the first page of the search
engine results, I’ll usually search the second and even third pages
or even try a different search engine (I usually use Google).

The problem of duplicate web content

Site owners are constantly looking for content to add to
their web sites, blogs and newsletters. They often don’t have
the time or knowledge to write it themselves and therefore will
find content that is already written for them.

The problem for the search engines is that it clogs up searches.
I don’t want to see the same information displayed in the top 10
sites on the first page of search engine results.

What does this mean for you and your web site?

Create your own unique web content.

Uniquely written web content will always give you better rankings
than content you have extracted elsewhere. If you write an article,
first place it on your own site, then wait for a few days before
submitting it to article directories.

This will allow your article to be indexed and ranked first by
the search engines. If you submit it to an article directory
first, the article directory page will outrank the article you
added to your own web page.

As more duplicate content appears on the Web, unique
web content will always do well, because it’s what people want.

I get emails everyday asking to exchange a link with my web site that offers web design services. Most of these sites are not related to web site design. These emails are never personalized and are template driven. This means the person is using link exchange software that searches the Net for sites to find links.

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