Twitter also provides a small widget for adding Tweet Button to your website which allows your website users to easily share your web pages with their followers and it displays the number of people who have tweeted about that particular page. The Tweet Button count box shows how many times the URL has been Tweeted. You can choose to display or hide the count box, or place it above or next to the Tweet Button.

As the Tweet text are editable by design. The users are always able to change the text of a Tweet they are going to publish from their own account. But to avoid any kind of URL confusion and split in Tweet Count, it is always recommended to use the cleanest URL and avoid the tracking parameters. i.e. utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign etc. The default Tweet Button works without any configuration or parameters. The Tweet Button will use the URL of the current webpage and the content of the <title> element as the text of the Tweet.

Sometimes you many need the Tweet counts for internal reporting and analytics purpose and many not like to do it manually, by visiting each and every page. You can easily automate this process by using free API's and PHP Codes. Tweetmeme has an API by which you can find out how many times a specific URL has been Tweeted.

Keyword Weight

Keyword weight indicates the significance of the keyword mentioned in a page. There are a lot of factors that affect the keyword weight. Search engines take into account the percentage of the keyword in the title and tags, calculate the percentage of the keyword in the text of the page, evaluate bold and italic tags, etc.

Keyword weight is amount of keywords used with relation to the total number of words used in the entire web page. When evaluating keyword weight, we also consider website internal factors: the presence of the keyword in Meta tags (Description & Keyword) and also in heading tags.

Internal Linking

Internal Links are hyperlinks that point at the same domain as the domain that the link exists on. Inner links from the main page of the site show the most important sections of the site and serves as one of the most important factors of domain ranking as a whole. Internal links are hyperlinks that refer to related pages on a website. External links from the main page tie the site with other sites and determines the site's niche.

To grow the amount of indexed pages, there should be more inner links than external links. The relation of external links to inner links influences the distribution of the site's weight in general. A great number of external links can be a sign that your site has been hacked and that links to SPAM resources have been added to the footer or hidden div elements in the HTML of your site.

Indexed Pages

Check the indexing of your website on major Search Engines like Google and Bing. The amount of indexed pages first of all indicates the domain weight. Web masters must strive to make the number of indexed pages close to the actual number of pages. If the amount of indexed web pages exceeds the actual number, this can be due to duplicate content.

Example: I use a PHP script on to automatically e-mail me when a page is not found. These are some of the most common errors:

• 400 - Bad request
• 401 - Authorization Required
• 403 - Forbidden
• 404 - Not Found
• 410 - Gone

The .htaccess file is what Apache web servers use to allow you to fine-tune your web server configurations at a directory level. Other types of web servers handle the customization of 4xx error pages differently.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. As an SEO, we have to consider how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience.

Why we need SEO?

SEO helps users/visitors/customers to locate our website (products & service) easily via search engines. Potential customers might not even know that our website (products & service) exists. SEO can make the content of your web pages more relevant, more attractive, and more easily read by search engines and their crawling and indexing software.

TABLEs also do have their place among web designs and have advantages over DIV tags in certain situations, where TABLEs exceed is the displaying data such as Calendar or Price List (Tabular Data). To create something similar strictly using DIV tags would be very time consuming and would require a significant amount of code. A TABLE makes quick work for Tabular Data.

Search engines and spiders don't care one way or another. Search engines look for content on the pages and not the HTML code, for that matter even the pages which are not HTML coded properly or W3C valid still get indexed and rank in search engines.

Last year after Google announced that PageSpeed is going to be one of the factors for ranking in Google Search, hereafter web developers started optimizing their web pages by applying web performance best practices, and also started avoiding TABLEs on their website and use DIVs instead.

The use of DIV tags in combination with an external CSS creates smaller sized web pages which results in faster load times when compared to TABLE based layouts. CSS move the styling code off-page and into an external file, thereby keeping page sizes as minimal as possible. DIVs offer more flexibility and you can change the layout of the complete site by just changing a few things in the CSS file(s).

Just like how Facebook uses OpenGraph Protocol enables you to integrate your Web pages into the social graph. Google is using OpenGraph and schema.org Rich Snippet mark-up to build rich annotations for your pages. The new inline annotations help increase engagement after users see a friend’s recommendation right on your page. You can use +Snippets to customize the Title, Thumbnail Image and Description that appear when your content is shared.

Customize +Snippet

<!-- Update your html tag to include the itemscope and itemtype attributes -->
			<html itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">

			<!-- Add the following three tags inside head -->
			<meta itemprop="name" content="Your Page Title/Heading Goes Here">
			<meta itemprop="description" content="Your Meta Description Goes Here...">
			<meta itemprop="image" content="http://www.example.com/images/cool-image.png">
			

To add inline annotations, you need to update your +1 button code. Visit the configuration tool, select ‘inline’ from the ‘Annotation’ menu, and grab a new snippet of code. Both sharing from +1 and inline annotations are rolling out fully over the next few days.

This is usually a result of the system failing to function because of an unplanned event, or because of routine maintenance. Unplanned downtime may be the result of a software bug, human error, equipment failure, malfunction, high bit error rate, power failure, overload due to exceeding the channel capacity, a cascading failure, etc.

Inevitably, web sites will suffer outages and downtime based on common events, including:

• Hardware failures
• Software failures
• Server updates
• Human Error
• Many other potential factors

As per W3.org (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html)

10.5.4 503 Service Unavailable

The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a Retry-After header. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD handle the response as it would for a 500 response.

To identify the author of an article, Google checks for a connection between the content page (such as an article), an author page, and a Google Profile.

• A link from your blog post or article to your author page using rel="author"
• A link from your author page to your Google profile page using rel="me"
• A link from your Google profile page to your author page using rel="me"

A rel="author" from Blog post to Author page

A content page can be any piece of content with an author: a news article, blog post, short story. Give a link from the blog post or the article page to the author page, which tells Google about the author of the posts.

Before strategizing on the URL structure for any website, following are the key points to remember.

Descriptive URLs

Most of the CMS systems produce dynamic URLs by default. These are usually long strings of text which are not understandable by humans. So, it is extremely essential to have descriptive, readable URLs that describe the content of every page.

If a user is searching for information related to dog food, a URL like the following will make it a lot easier for users to understand the context of the link.

http://www.example.com/dog-food

Following is a typical example of a dynamic URL which does not clearly specify the context of the link.

http://www.example.com/index.html?id_sezione=360&sid=6a5eb777944f41kaa6f849f730f1

Keywords in URL

When forming a URL structure for a website it is essential to have relevant keywords in the URLs. Not only this will help the user in understanding the context of the link, it also has SEO advantages from Search Engine point of view.

The following URL clearly explains what the page is all about.

http://www.example.com/dog-food

Many of us believe that the future of the internet is in mobile devices, such as cell and smart phones, PDAs, and more. It has become very necessary to have a mobile-friendly website as mobile website is gaining a lot of popularity in the online market and increases your overall audience base.

Although Google is smart enough to figure out your mobile content is not duplicate to your main content - because they are smart enough to know when to show you the mobile content versus the normal content. But you feel Google is seeing your mobile website as duplicate content of your main website, and it is affecting your search ranking.

You can use your CSS - Cascading Style Sheets to leverage user agent detection. This is one of the best practices for mobile website design. Essentially, instead of creating secondary website, a secondary CSS file can be added to a website specifically for mobile devices.

Static URLs are always known to be better compared with dynamic URLs in SEO, because of many reasons. Static URLs are always more users friendly to your website visitors, static URLs normally rank much better in search engines and search engines are known to index the content of static URLs a lot faster compared to dynamic URLs.

There are two kinds of URLs over the web, and they are ‘Dynamic URL’ and ‘Static URL’. Dynamic URLs are generated by database-driven website, dynamic URLs are generated from specific queries to a site's database. On the other hand a static URL is a URL that doesn't change, and doesn't have any variable strings or appended parameters. Static URLs are typically ranked better in search engine results pages, and they are indexed more quickly than dynamic URLs.

If there are event page(s) or offer page(s) or product page(s), which is technically invalid after a period of time (let’s say an event is over on August 29th 2010, what should be the response code for that particular page after it’s expire). As technically the page have expired and should be removed from Search Engine Index.

In the recent Google Webmasters YouTube Channel, I have asked Matt Cutts about “What should be done with the website expired pages?” Though I’m still waiting for the official statement from Matt Cutts in the Webmaster Videos, I have discussed this topic with my fellow SEO colleagues and came up the following options.

In case if the web master doesn’t take any action the page will return 200 OK response code, but as a best practices the page should expire and return 410 GONE response code. But should we do a 301 Permanent Redirect to its parent page, so the link juice and PR the page have generated will be passed to the existing page or should we do a 404 Error code, which is not cool at all or 410 GONE which is the right response code for expired pages.

The .htaccess file is a configuration file which is used on Apache based web servers to control many features of the server. The .htaccess file gives webmasters a lot of control over their website. The file contains the configuration statements (web server configurations) to customize the Apache Web server software for the website.

Hypertext Access, commonly shortened to .htaccess file is an incredibly useful feature which allows webmasters to control so many aspects of their website and how it works. The file acts as a local configuration file so that an individual website can customize the configuration to match its requirements. Other .htaccess files in subdirectories may change or nullify the effects of those in parent directories.

You can use any text editor to create or make changes to .htaccess files. Be sure .htaccess file is uploaded in ASCII mode, not BINARY, or it won't work. A web master should be very careful while editing the .htaccess files, as even a small mistake can make the website stop working. Web master should immediately test the site to be sure it works.

Soon I realized that the two images which didn’t get indexed are having height less than 30px and rest of the images are having height more than 30px. Although I have seen Google have indexed images which are less than 30px.

It is like, if a page has multiple images and Google have crawl budget for that site/page – Google is more likely to index bigger images compared with smaller once.

Let’s say a product page, which has 3 images:

• Image 1 – 500x400
• Image 2 – 300x250
• Image 3 – 100x50

Google is more likely to index Image 1 then Image 2 and then Image 3 - Bigger image get more priority compared with smaller once.

What is it?

Mobile Search and Mobile Optimization are the next big growth opportunity in Online Marketing. Mobile search continues to be an evolving area of traffic that is converging on many mobile platforms, phones and mobile devices. Web search ability in a mobile form allows users to find mobile content.

Why is it important?

Mobile search is growing so rapidly that many analysts expect it to outpace desktop search by 2011. Creates opportunities in branded searches to have multiple listings appear creating deeper reach on the search page.

Mobile search engines have different spiders and algorithms than those used for traditional web search. Evaluate websites as if it rendered on a mobile phone. Results ranked partially based on how well pages render on the device submitting the query.

In the log files we have seen that Googlebot-Mobile has different user agents that spoof different phones, like a Samsung phone, an iPhone or an Erickson phone. In some cases, different handsets will have different search results based on the evaluations that Google makes with the different user agents.

The best thing to improve mobile SEO is to ensure that the mobile crawlers and user agents determine that content of the website will render well and load quickly on any mobile phone.

While the mobile search engines are not as finely tuned as the traditional engines, they still placing a heavy weight on bounce rate, using the mobile visitors to gauge how the website renders on mobile devices.

There are many more Meta tags than just ‘Meta Description’ and ‘Meta Keywords’. At one point Meta tags were considered a relatively important factor by search engines. AltaVista and other older search engines used them to help determine a site’s theme as well as relevance to a given term. This is no longer the case, search engines now rely on much more advanced techniques to do this.

META Description Tag

Enter a brief description of your site and what it offers. This is sometimes used by search engines as a website’s “snippet” for search results.

<meta name="description" content=" Meta Description Tag should not be longer 
			than 400 characters in length and should not be shorter than 125 characters 
			in length" />

Google team confirmed that they have started putting this in action though the number of websites ranking changed on the basis of load time are very less. Google strongly recommends that all webmasters regularly monitor site performance using Page Speed, YSlow, WebPagetest, or other tools.

Best practices for making web pages load faster!

Minimize HTTP Requests

Reducing the number of HTTP requests in your page is the key for faster web pages. Below are some techniques for reducing the number of HTTP requests.

Combining files: By combining all external Java Scripts into a single Java Script file, and similarly combining all CSS into a single Stylesheet file, will reduce the number of HTTP requests.

By doing this I have reduced the numbers HTTP Requests to my web server from six Java Script HTTP Requests files to only one Java Script HTTP Request, which can really add up when you have thousands of visitors visiting your website every single day.

Similarly combining all my external CSS into a single Stylesheet file I can further reduce HTTP requests to the web server.

CSS Sprites: These are used to reduce the number of HTTP Requests for images on a web page. In this process, a developer combines all images into a single image and use the CSS background-image and background-position properties to then display the desired image segment.

Avoid bad requests: Avoid wasteful requests like unwanted redirects, broken links, error responses etc. Removing all broken links, unwanted redirects and requests that result in 404/410 errors can help reducing the HTTP Request.

Optimize Images

It is very important to keep all your website image(s) size at minimum. Lighter, optimized image(s) will load faster for users and are preferred by indexing sites like Google Images. Properly formatted and compressed image(s) can save many bytes of data, and improperly optimized images can take up more space than they need to.

You can optimize your image(s) by cropping unnecessary space (white space), reducing color depth to the lowest acceptable level, removing image comments and saving the image in a more web-friendly file format (.jpg, .gif)

Specify image dimensions: Specifying the height and width attributes for all the images helps web browsers render web pages faster, as the web browser is not forced to spend time unnecessarily on calculating the height and width of image(s) and can instead use this time to render other elements of the web page.

Social Media Buttons helps you to share your content with the social Web. These buttons allows your visitors to share your content quickly and easily if they feel the content is worth sharing. It can also help you to generate significant amount of traffic to your site, without spending any extra penny.

Social Media Share Button also look at your page to find a relevant Title, Description and Image etc. You should use <title> and <meta> tags to your page to help them to find these information.

How to add Custom Share Buttons

If you want to add very specific Social Media Share Buttons like Facebook, Twitter, Digg etc. They are available individually.

Add Facebook Share Button

Facebook: The Share Button is the easiest way to allow your content to be shared on Facebook.

<a name="fb_share" type="box_count" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php">
			Share</a><script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" 
			type="text/javascript"></script>

Add Twitter Share Button

Twitter: Add this button to your website to let people share content on Twitter without having to leave the page. Promote strategic Twitter accounts at the same time while driving traffic to your website.

<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" 
			data-count="vertical" data-via="YOUR-TWITTER-ID">Tweet</a><script 
			type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

What are applications?

There are over 250,000 applications built using the Twitter API. To use most applications, you first authorize the application to access your Twitter account, after which you can use it to read and post Tweets, discover new users and more. Applications come in many varieties, including desktop applications like TweetDeck, Seesmic, or EchoFon, websites such as TweetMeme, fflick, or Topsy, or mobile applications such as Twitter for iPhone, Twitter for Blackberry, or Foursquare.

Update 1: New authorization rules for applications

Starting August 31, all applications will be required to use “OAuth” to access your Twitter account.

What's OAuth?

• OAuth is a technology that enables applications to access Twitter on your behalf with your approval without asking you directly for your password.
• Desktop and mobile applications may still ask for your password once, but after that request, they are required to use OAuth in order to access your timeline or allow you to tweet.

The Yahoo! and Bing search alliance covers algorithmic search (web, image and video), search advertising and contextual advertising. It does not include other aspects of display advertising, vertical searches or site searches, such as queries on Flickr or Yahoo! News etc.

Microsoft (Bing) will be responsible for the algorithmic search serving platform used by both search engines, including web, image and video results. Microsoft will also be responsible for the search advertising platform that will be used by both search engines (adCenter), and will manage the search advertising marketplace. Yahoo! will provide Microsoft with an exclusive 10-year license to certain Yahoo! search technologies. Yahoo! will also deliver a differentiated search experience for its users by innovating around the listings it receives from Microsoft by integrating Yahoo! content, shortcuts and tools.

Discover the search engine marketing firm, The Search Agency offering search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), and conversion path optimization (CPO) services.

The world's largest enterprise software company, Oracle is the only vendor to offer solutions for every tier of your business - database, middleware, business intelligence, business applications, and collaboration. With Oracle, you get information that helps you measure results, improve business processes, and communicate a single truth to your constituents.

MetricStream is a market leader in Enterprise-wide GRC and Quality Solutions for global corporations. MetricStream enterprise solutions are used by leading corporations in diverse industries such as pharmaceutical, medical device, high tech manufacturing, energy, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, food and beverages and automotive to manage quality processes, manage corporate policies, manage regulatory and industry-mandated compliance and corporate governance initiatives.

ComplianceOnline is an industry focused portal, developed for the practitioners of quality and regulatory compliance. ComplianceOnline is the most comprehensive resource for compliance and quality.

ING Vysya Foundation aims at facilitating an enabling environment to promote education for children, living in difficult circumstances. Foundation's target audience is less privileged children. It encourages children to go to school, learn well and to become a responsible citizen of India by creating opportunities to change their lives through education.

Many key players are participating in the W3C effort including representatives from the four major browser vendors: Apple, Mozilla, Opera, and Microsoft. A draft of the HTML5 spec was released in 2008 and parts of it are now showing up in browsers. At first glance it looks to be a programming language like PHP, but not so, it is still an XML based language.

The implementation of new tags and elements, a richer experience will emerge on the Web with some new features.

Embedded Audio and Video: You can create rich, interactive photo galleries by combining CSS 2D and 3D transforms with CSS transitions and use CSS gradients to add a highlight and/or shadow to your images.

A new <footer> tag: The <header> and <footer> tags can be used many times on one page - i.e. you can have a separate header/footer for each section and this gives really a lot of flexibility.

A Custom Error Page is a placeholder for web pages that fail to load when a human visitor and/or a search engine spider tries to view a webpage. Improperly configured Error Pages may also produce duplicate content issues by producing the same content across unique URLs.

Last month Matt Cutts buzzed about Google top signals for country specific websites, which was:

Matt Cutts Googlee Buzz
(click on the image to enlarge)

1. Country Code TLD (ccTLD) such as .de or .fr - It makes sense when a website address is having country code (ccTLD), it is very easy to figure out which part of the world the website belongs to.

They are only twitting about their Blogs (:

I Tweet About My Blog
(click on the image to enlarge)

Now get a T-Shirt printed of this...

HTTP_INFO - Request received, continuing process.

Indicates a provisional response, consisting only of the Status-Line and optional headers, and is terminated by an empty line.

• 100 Continue - HTTP_CONTINUE
• 101 Switching Protocols - HTTP_SWITCHING_PROTOCOLS
• 102 Processing - HTTP_PROCESSING

2xx Success / OK

HTTP_SUCCESS - The action was successfully received, understood, and accepted.

Indicates that the client’s request was successfully received, understood, and accepted.

• 200 OK - HTTP_OK
• 201 Created - HTTP_CREATED
• 202 Accepted - HTTP_ACCEPTED
• 203 Non-Authoritative Information - HTTP_NON_AUTHORITATIVE
• 204 No Content - HTTP_NO_CONTENT
• 205 Reset Content - HTTP_RESET_CONTENT
• 206 Partial Content - HTTP_PARTIAL_CONTENT
• 207 Multi-Status - HTTP_MULTI_STATUS

3xx Redirect

HTTP_REDIRECT - The client must take additional action to complete the request.

Indicates that further action needs to be taken by the user-agent in order to fulfill the request. The action required may be carried out by the user agent without interaction with the user if and only if the method used in the second request is GET or HEAD. A user agent should not automatically redirect a request more than 5 times, since such redirections usually indicate an infinite loop.

Many web designers find it difficult to align the DIV in the center of the web page, because DIV's are 100% in width by default. We can overcome this situation by using CSS or JavaScript.

There are two ways to place a DIV at the center of a web page, JavaScript and CSS.

The new format shows links to specific events on the page along with dates and locations. It provides a fast and convenient way for users to determine if a page has events they may be interested in.

About event information: When event information is marked up in the body of a web page, Google can identify it and may make that information available in search results pages. Information such as an event’s title, date, and venue can help users decide which pages to click on in search results. Google currently uses this data only for pages with a collection of events.

Properties: Google recognizes the following event properties (derived from the hCalendar microformat standard), and may include their content in search results.

Well my main focus in this blog is the "Status Line Update(s)". People publish all weird status updates or talking out of the context, which make no sense to your friends, networks and followers, because no one has any idea what the hell you are talking about.

So what should I publish in my status line or tweet about and what I should not?
Well my answer is "keep your personal life personal" and try not to making your personal life public. Below are few points you should not do at all.

- Your kids, dog, cat, goat, or whatever else (E.g. Wow, Jackie just did #2 on the doormat, so cute - http://tinyurls/wtf) It's understood that your children and pets are your world. But to everyone else, they are a glorified tamagotchi.

- Talking out of context (E.g. Yuppie, the spider pig saved the world again, but he is little mad at Santa for now.) Now what the hack does this mean? Seriously no one has any idea what you are talking about. It's not cool at all and it lame and sucks.

- The conference or event you are at (E.g. OMG @DumbGuy what a presentation dude, you totally OWNED that last session on optimizing your twitter background pic.) Frankly speaking no one outside of that conference or event gives a crap about it.

One reason I can think of is the business wants to create their brand first before the sale. They don't understand that the landing pads do carry their company brand, landing pad header contains brand logo and footer have access to the rest of the website (Privacy Policy, Contact Us, Sitemap, About Us etc.)

Now imagine you are searching for 'Nokia N95' in Google search, (Sorry, but like many other people, even I have a habit of using the Google search first.) and the first result is Nokia. Cool, now a pop-up quiz: Would you like to go to Nokia homepage and search the website till you find the Nokia N95 page, or would you be more satisfied just going to the actual Nokia N95 page and finding it immediately? The answer is very obvious.

XML Sitemap helps search engines crawlers to crawl the website and keep their results up to date. These XML sitemaps can be submitted to Google, Bing and Yahoo! search engines.

XML sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be crawled and being crawled does not guarantee indexing. However, XML sitemap is still the best insurance for getting a search engine to learn about your entire website.

In XML sitemap, errors are not tolerated, and so syntax must be exact. It is advised to validate the XML sitemap every time before going live.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/" />

This tag tells all the major search engine bots (Google, Bing & Yahoo!) that the page in question should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL http://www.example.com/ and that all of the link & content metrics the engines apply should technically flow back to that URL.

Canonicalization helps to solve issues like www version vs. non-www version, re-directs, duplicate URLs, hijacking, etc... Avoiding duplicates in the search engine index has consistently been a key concern to all SEOs, Web Masters and Site Owners. When you use the <link> tag, you can indicate the canonical URL form for crawlers to use for each page of content, no matter how it was retrieved.

Always keep this in mind that the 'robots.txt' file is meant to prevent search engine spiders from searching certain pages. That is why by using 'robots.txt' file properly, you can direct the spiders to locate the most important pages on your website and not to locate certain files. You can also use the spiders to prevent indexing the duplicate pages in your website, because having duplicate content can actually reduce your search engine ranking. With the help of the 'robots.txt' file, you can tell the search engine spiders which pages they should and should not crawl and index. You can instruct the spiders to look only at the main/important web pages and folder and leave the rest alone.

To successfully use the 'robots.txt' file, first you need to determine which pages you don't want the spiders to search. You need to upload the 'robots.txt' file to the root folder/directory of your domain or in your sub-domains. Adding it to your subdirectories will not work.

Meta Tags: Title Tag, Meta Keyword and Meta Description tags should be included in your HTML code at the top of every page. Search engines will crawl them and store them to display in their search results. Again, each page should be optimized separately and have a unique title, keywords, and description tags.

Navigation: Normally I will suggest Top, Left and Bottom Navigation, also if possible breadcrumb navigation too. Make sure it stays the same across the board on all pages of your site. Your job is to guide your visitors through your website, making sure they always know where they are and how to get to where they need to go.

Search Engine Optimized: Trust me it is very important, everybody wants their pages to rank well in the search engines. All the pages of your website should be optimized with 2, or 3 keywords/phrases. Use your keywords into your title tag, Meta keyword and description and in the body of each page, also use them in your images alt tag, even in the names you give your pages.

Google Analytics/Tracking System: Once your site is up and running you'll want to keep your eye on traffic. Who's visiting your website, what pages are the most popular, where is the traffic coming from. All of these questions and more can be answered by using a good analytics program. You can use Google Analytics for this, once registered you will be given some Java Script code to copy and paste in all your web pages.

If you are using paid search networks (PPC), you will have access to click-through reports provided by your PPC network/vendor. You may find that these numbers don't match with your web analytics reports. This is really painful as you are spending a lot of time and money in PPC. And if the PPC reports don't match with web analytics reports it's a waste of your time and money.

Understand the difference between 'Click' and 'Visit'

PPC vendors, such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter measure clicks and web analytics measure visitors that can accept a cookie. Now they are not going to be the same because cookie blocks, Java Script errors and visitors who simply navigate quickly by clicking on to another page before the web analytics code has loaded to collect data. Because of this, web analytics reports tend to show slightly less visits compared with PPC report.

Wrong Tracking URL's Tracking

URL's are very important in any PPC campaign, as this setup is needed to differentiate between paid search and non-paid search engine visitors (e.g.: http://www.your-domain.com?source=google). Sometimes tracking URL's are forgotten during the PPC campaign setups or simply by assigning incorrect URL's into them, which leads to such inaccuracies in the reports.

Invalid Clicks

Imagine a visitor clicks on your ad several times on purpose in a short period of time, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and other PPC vendors can automatically monitor those invalid and fraudulent clicks and adjust the PPC metrics accordingly. But your web analytics tools will count/record this entire invalid and fraudulent click for your PPC campaign.

In today’s world Web Analytics are the tools and methods used by organizations to track the number of people visiting their website and later analyzing the success of their online strategies. Web analytics data can never be 100% accurate. Finding the errors is difficult and the levels of details are critical.

Collecting Visitors Data

The two common techniques to collect the website visitors data are the Log Files data and the Page Tags (scripts). Log Files data comes from your web server and independent of the visitors browser. It is also known as “server-side data collection", it captures all the requests made by the website visitors to your web server including the visitors IP address, date/time, web pages, images and PDFs.

The best part about log files are they can track mobile visitors also as most of the mobile phones yet do not support Java Script or cookies. Log files are able to track all visitors who browse using their mobile phones, which a Page Tags can’t do. Log files can also track all the hits to your website PDF’s, DOC’s, EXE’s, ZIP’s & XLS’s files which a Page Tag can’t do as you cannot tag these files.

But the visits by Robots/Spiders/Crawlers can also multiply your data figures, as search engines use them to fetch and index your website. These affect web analytics because log file will show all data for robots activity on your website even though they are not real visitors. In Log Files, one IP address counts as one visitor. A log file tracks visitor sessions by accumulating all hits from the same IP address and web browser per visitor.

Getting more relevant traffic to your website and increase your sales and website ranking. A Landing Page is the first thing any user interacts with before interacting with you/company and it may or may not lead to a sale. All your SEO (Organic/Paid) efforts are not going to create the sales with bad landing pages, its just waste of your time and money.

Websites can make more than double their conversions with landing pages that are properly designed to convert traffic to conversions (such as opt-in sign ups and direct sales). When visitors come to your website from any search engine, you must connect with your visitors and offer them real substance.

Just think for a moment, you can beat your competition without increasing your PPC advertising or without increasing your SEO efforts.

How!

By clearly explaining what you want your website visitors to do and why they should do it. Why should they buy from you and not form you competitors or opt-in for future contact. What separates you from your competitors? Why should they choose you over others? You should be able to clearly explain the advantage to your products/services to the visitors.

Create your landing page with valuable content, products or services. Understand the importance of good content. Place primary and secondary keywords within the first 25 words in your page content and spread them evenly throughout the document. Analyses, Research and use the right keywords/phrases to attract your target customers. If you know what's important to your customers then you would focus on those keywords. Use your keywords in the right fields and references within your web page. Like Title, META tags, Headers, etc.

A corporate website should always maintain its integrity and be professional in design and development. That doesn't mean it can't be flashy or jazzy till you can maintain the professionalism. The website should not be irritating to the visitor/user, they should not be wasting there time when they are looking for something on your website.

Have a proper layout of the site, categories them in sections by products, news, events etc. Go with the colors for your wesite, which should compliment the company logo. Use a common font throughout the website, don't use multiple fonts in different sections keep everything constant. Make your site easy to use easy to navigate and easy to read.

Check spelling in your website content, be honest with the content tell the truth about yourself, products, offers you announce. Design/Code/Build the website to load as fast as possible it helps those with expensive and/or slow Internet connections. Make sure your pages are working on any browser (browser independent) check your website in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape (old and new versions). Check all your Scripting/Coding are working fine across all browsers.

To be sure that the eMail Newsletter is reaching to the end users properly without any formatting issue(s) and getting displayed properly to the end users, follow the below guidelines.

HTML Code Validation: Normally the eMail Newsletters are in HTML format, and should be validated properly before final send-out, there should not be any missing tags or extra tags. You can use W3C Validator to validate your pages.

Finally never forget to do HTML encoding to the special characters. Always place your company logo on the top left side of the eMail. Grab users attention by your eMail headline(s). Try to avoid CSS (Style Sheets) in your eMail Newsletters no matter if its Inline, Embedded, or External CSS, use HTML font tags

<font face=" Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#000000" size="2">

Text eMail: Keep your text eMail content simple, direct and to the point on your offer in short statements and bulleted text. Limit your each line length to 70 characters to prevent unwanted wrapping. Don't attempt to create boxes with characters like "-" and "". Use dashes (-) and asterisks (*) as separators for different sections of the message. All links should be on its own line with some additional text.)

Always remember, "A hit to your website can lead to a sale". Knowing what to do and what not to do for your website while following the Best Practices of SEO, will help you in sales and creating a brand in the market.

SEO Do's and Don'ts

Key Tips (Hint) In your website you should maintain proper HTML Tags:

• META Tags
• Title Tag
• H1, H2, H3... Tags
• Use of Anchor tags cleverly
• File Naming Convention
• Tool Tips
• Link exchange etc...