It’s virtually become a standard to integrate +1, Like, or Tweet buttons into any webpage. Sure thing, the sharing and rating buttons contribute to your overall social media exposure, but have you thought that some of them may give you even more value?

For instance, Google +1 button collects rather valuable information about your target audience, which may help you improve the performance of your ad campaigns in Facebook, Adwords, or other advertising networks. Read more »

Either as a professional SEO or webmaster you might have been stuck in a situation when the available keyword research tools like:

• AdWords Keyword Tool
• WordTracker Free Tool
• Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, or
• Any other tool of your choice

Fail to provide you with any keyword ideas. Typically, it happens due to any of the following reasons or their combination:

• A new keyword/ object/ notion (e.g., you are promoting an absolutely new product or service)
• The keyword has very low search volume (the research tools often omit such keywords)
• Adult or restricted niche (the research tools may, and they actually do, filter out 'adult' related keywords from their results)

There are a few techniques that might help you pick out potentially good keywords despite the lack of information. Read on! Read more »

Any online business is fuelled by traffic. The more clicks you get to your money-making site – the more cash you are likely to credit to your account (I bet at the moment you guys are shouting “Thank you, Cap!”, but be patient, you are a few steps away from the “how to” paragraph

Along with the search engines and social networks video hosting websites are on the list of the most visited websites in the world and present a good opportunity for a skilled Internet marketer. Just have a look at YouTube stats gauged by Alexa and DoubleClick.

YouTube is the third most visited website worldwide and the third most visited website in the US. The number of daily unique YouTube visitors is constantly growing. Furthermore, there are lots of minor video hosting websites (regional or specialized), where you may get additional exposure. Read more »

On October 19 Google announced that Google Analytics (GA) will be enhanced with a new visualization tool – Visitors Flow and Goal Flow. It took a few weeks to roll out the feature across all GA accounts.

Now, when most of you should have access to it, let’s have a look at all the new goodies we are getting.

The feature is a better alternative to the Funnel Visualization and Reverse Goal Path tools. It’s more flexible and lets you watch how the users interact with your content at a wider perspective.

Before we start, make sure you are using the new version of Google Analytics. Read more »

On October 06 webmaster and SEO discussion boards were boiling with "Google PageRank update is under way", "PR on my sites is n/a", "Google discards PR" and similar threads. In fact, Google engineers decided to change the toolbar query URL from

to

Non-native toolbars and tools were still using the old URL, which caused the verification errors and consequently heart attacks and other grave conditions with the webmasters who are using such tools to verify the PageRank of their websites.

For a long time PageRank (PR) has been a benchmark and equivalent of quality/ value for many people making money online: domainers (the guys who are selling dropped domains with PR) determine the price of the domains based on PR; link-sellers will also charge you based on the PR of the page, from which they are selling links; link-builders normally trade links of the same PR, etc. But what metrics we’d have to use if PR is discontinued? Are there any other good alternatives? (We are going to include only the metrics that may be obtained via reputable, relatively unbiased and time-proven sources in this post). Read more »

Whatever you do on the Internet – the Big Brother is watching you! Some Internet marketing activities may require a degree of anonymity, when you don’t want to expose your real IP (or you’d rather rotate your IPs) and don’t want the web scripts to earmark you with cookies.

We pulled together a few proven solutions that will help you sneak into web hosted properties without leaving your fingerprints there.

Required Software

• Firefox browser
• FoxyProxy add-on. Foxyproxy lets you change the preset proxy servers in Firefox with a click.
• Remove Cookies for Site add-on. This add-on lets you remove cookies set by the website that you are currently view with one click.
• BetterPrivacy add-on. This add-on removes somewhat more persistent flash cookies from your PC.
• Ghostery add-on. Ghostery blocks various scripts and beacons that are used to track your activity on the web.
• RandomUserAgent add-on and/or User Agent Switcher add-on. Random user agent replaces the default browser user agent with random user agents. User Agent Switcher lets you switch between preconfigured user agents. You may even pretend to be Googlebot.
• TOR, Set up the stable TOR release and or use I2P. TOR and I2P are both networks that help you protect your privacy by hiding your real IP. The two networks have different technologies and architecture under the hood but that does not make any difference for an ordinary end user. Unlike free proxy servers which are not always really anonymous and may disclose your real IP, these networks offer better privacy protection.

Read more »

In one of the recent posts we've talked about the outdated SEO techniques. The topic is not exhausted yet. Today we'd like to share with you a trick that used to work just fine some 5-6 years ago. Although, it is not as powerful as it used to be, you may still to put it to use.

As long ago as in 2003 a new startup - del.icio.us (now it is delicious.com) - was born. It is a service that enables users to save and share their web bookmarks. The concept is simple: users have a profile page, where their bookmarks are listed; the bookmarks are categorized with tags; the bookmarks may be either private or shared; the shared bookmarks are globally available to other users. Within a short run the service became very popular and hit over 300K active users. Web entrepreneurs throughout the globe created dozens of del.icio.us flavors, they alternated the functionality slightly but the concept remained the same (this fact created a loophole for the SEOs). Read more »

When it comes to traffic analysis, an e-commerce marketer has to tackle a set of complicated issues: how to segment incoming traffic, analyze visitors’ behavior, detect visitors with specific needs, and satisfy these needs. To solve these problems you’d need the proper tools (luckily you may get them for free) and helpful insights that come in this blog post, so read on.

In a series of posts we discussed the power of Google Analytics, a free web analysis SEO software that provides you with abundance of statistic data. It tells you almost everything you need to know about your website visitors from keywords they used to find your website, to their screen resolution. Google Analytics team went even one step further. They created a tool that enables web analysts to slice and dice the traffic according to their specific needs. It’s called Custom Variables. Read more »

If you have never heard about affiliate marketing and money making then you’ve probably been offline for the recent 10 years or so. Plug your PC to www and get flooded with a non-stop flow of offers to “get rich with no efforts”. Is it really that easy?! Our answer is No. You do need to spend time and efforts to succeed. Read on for a few tips that might guide you in the right direction.

Typically, after you sign up for an affiliate program you get armored with powerful marketing tools. In many cases affiliate networks develop a few downloadable templates that you may use to run your own e-commerce website. The typical freshmen would download the script, set it up on their web server and being misled by the offer of easy money would wait for the skies to burst with a golden rain. As a result, Internet gets clogged with thousands of web pages that are as like as two peas. A 100% non-unique website has no chances to rank high and brings no additional value to the Internet community.

There are several things one may do to make an affiliate website look more appealing to search engines. Read more »

We’ve already covered goals set up in earlier posts for Google Analytics Ninjas. Since then it seemed to be quite a depleted topic until Google team introduced the updated version of Google Analytics.

Above all other goodies the new GA enables web analysts to set Events as Goals and track even more interactions with the website. If you are still missing on this opportunity – read on!

It is easy to neglect some user interactions with the website that present high level of engagement and may indirectly lead to a conversion at a later stage. Such actions or Events include: viewing video presentations, listening to the audio, liking/ twitting/ commenting/ sharing, downloading white papers and presentations. Imagine a situation when you are trying to generate leads using a landing page with a video presentation but you don’t know how many (if any) visitors are viewing it, and for how long. In such case you have no basis to compare the performance of various traffic channels against each other and your efforts are potentially sub-optimal. Read more »