Everyone likes to know statistics about their website.  Here is the way to learn the Google Pagerank and tons of other information, not just about your own site, but any one you choose.

I have purchased and installed a program on my companion website PageRankToday called RankChecker. 

RankChecker is a great program written as a php script and is easily installed on a webserver.  It is hosted on a site called GetRank.org.  You can get to the website by clicking on the picture to the right.  The author has a great demo of the front page as well as the administrative area. 

This script gives a tremendous amount of information about any website you wish to explore.  Straight from the website, here are the tools and information it displays.

TOOLS:

• Domain Age
• Google Pagerank
• Alexa Rank
• Google Backlinks
• Yahoo Backlinks
• Alexa Backlinks
• Altavista Backlinks
• AllTheWeb Backlinks
• DMOZ Directory
• Yahoo Directory
• Google Indexed Pages
• Yahoo Indexed Pages
• Bing Indexed Pages
• ASK Indexed Pages
• Digg Links
• Delicious Links
• Google Bot Last Visit
• Site Value
• Pagerank Button

I am looking forward to having RankChecker as part of my SEO toolkit.  I have made it available on PageRankToday as one of my SEO Tools, but I would encourage you to purchase a copy for yourself if you would like to host it on your site.  The $10 cost is minimal. 

If you aren't really sure, there is a free version that doesn't have all of the features, but would give a good "test drive".  You can access the free version from the GetRank.org main page, or just click -> HERE.

I have only good things to say about this script and its author.  There were a couple of small issues with the script running on my hosting server, but they were quickly fixed.  I would rate the Script and Support outstanding.  

RankChecker is a great way to learn many details about any website, not just your own.

Enjoy!

-Loren

Here is an excellent article that gives a Checklist of items you should use when you set up a new website.  I agree with the author.  Even if you have an "old" website these items are essential.  Credit to the Author is at the bottom of the article.

A great read.  Enjoy!

-Loren

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Stop! Before you push your fledgling site from the nest, here are 8 simple steps to ensure a successful launch.

In fact even if your web site is already live, there is no harm in going thru the checklist.

Marketing Value for You – Value for Your Web Clients

The 8 Point Pre Flight Checklist can easily be turned into a spreadsheet based checklist and applied to all your new sites. Then after all checks are complete, you can mail the checklist to your new site owner(s). This small marketing effort will demonstrate to your new customers that you are serious about giving them value for the money that they just spent on their new site.

The 8 Point Pre Flight Checklist

1. Page Title (the very first line in your browser)

From a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) point of view, this is the most important piece of text on any web page. Check each page and make sure that:

Remember that the first 60 odd characters of your title text is what really counts. Remove all unnecessary stop words like and, the, a etc.

Important:  as part of your title check, it is also a good idea to check that each page’s keywords and description text are loaded.

2. Cross Browser Testing

It is surprising how often a user will point out to you that one of your sites does not work properly in such and such a browser. I once had a client with a site that did not work at all in Firefox. He took a year before giving us the go-ahead to fix it, because he was not too concerned about Firefox (lol!).

There are two ways to do cross browser testing.

i)  You can use a cross browser test system (various are available) – we use crossbrowsertesting.com

ii)  You can do the task manually after loading the various browsers onto your PC.

At very least check your site in Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox and Chrome. Go thru all links and check all pages work as advertised. Don’t forget to check any pages that have forms with validation.

(If you have the time check multiple versions of the browsers – like IE 7 and IE

3. Check Links

It is best to make use of an automated link checker tool, such as the free W3C Link Checker too. The tool can be found at http://validator.w3.org/checklink. After pointing it at your site (you can usually ignore the options), it will detect and check all links and then return with a report of all broken or redirected links.

You can also of course, as part of the above (Cross Browser test) – manually click on each and every link on the site to make sure that they open properly.

4. Check Forms Work

Check all contact forms actually work. This means that the validation works and that the requisite emails get fired off and arrive in the correct mailboxes. Most forms send a copy of the input to the site owner/webmaster/support person and also a thank you to the person who filled in the form.

Make sure that this process works. There WILL be a war with your client if contact mails are not firing as they should be.

5. Proofread All Content

Try and re-read all text content on the site. Check for misspellings and syntax errors.

(If you are the site owner, now is a good time to make sure all the words make sense and do try to cut out any text that looks superfluous. Less is always more with text)

6. Sitemap

The site should be using an automated site map creation script. Although it is possible to do this manually, this is not advisable. Manual site maps quickly become a high maintenance and are prone to unnecessary errors.

Check that the sitemap works.  Look to see that all your pages appear in the automated XML output.

7. Analytics Code

Make sure that any code required for the analysis of web stats is loaded on every page. Also make sure that the stats are actually being collected by checking to see if your testing gets recorded.

Google Analytics is a good system to use. It is low cost (free!) and produces brilliant results. Irrespective of your choice of analysis system – make sure it is working and recording stats.

8. Favicon

The site icon is an important part of the visual branding of your site. (It is often found as favicon.ico in the root folder of a site) Check to see if it is showing. This is a small but important part of a site’s branding, which also appears as part of the site bookmark in most browsers.

Suggested Options

1)  Add the site to Google Webmaster Tools (also Bing), there are many tools that deliver great value that are included in the tools.

2) List the site in various important directories. Especially Google and Yahoo and any popular local directories.
 

There are methods other than SEO to generate Web Traffic.  This post will discuss other methods to get visitors to your website, it’s not all about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). 

Welcome to the final video in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Video Series.  This video has a rather long running time of 24 minutes, but it is well worth it. 

You will learn how to increase your website traffic using:

Search Engine Optimization – Video 3

As with the other two video tutorials, this final clip has some great tips on getting more relevant visitors to your blog or website.  The instructor gives out ideas and theories, and then follows up with practical examples. 

Just in case you missed them, here are links to the first two Videos in in the SEO Series.

Search Engine Optimization – The Power of Linking.  The Second Video in this Series deals with Linking.  Linking is a powerful SEO tool.  In this video tutorial on Search Engine Optimization you will learn strategies to increase your ranking using linking methods.  Here is a short summary:

• The SEO power of Linking
• Home page Linking
• Article Directory Linking
• Getting your site into DMOZ
• Linking through Comments

Search Engine Optimization – Video 2

This video has a lot of good tips on getting traffic to your blog through linking.  It lasts about 20 minutes, and is well worth the time if you want to increase the ranking and therefore the visitors to your website or blog.  I feel this is a good tutorial in that it provides enough technical background on how Google and other Search Engines utilize linking both internal and external to rank your site, but then goes directly into practical application examples.  If you like this one, stay tuned, Video 3 has even more valuable information. 

Enjoy the Video!

-Loren

As usual I will include the links to the videos I have already covered in the series:

Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it is widely know is a key concept that all webmasters and bloggers need to understand.  TheTeachingBox is proud to present a 5 Part Tutorial series on SEO. 

I came across these videos a while back, and thought that they would be a good fit for Technology and Education.  Granted SEO Optimization is a bit more on the advanced side, but everyone could learn from these videos.

As with my other video series, I will present the 5 videos one at a time so that you are able to focus on the content and think about how you will implement the information on your own website.  As we cover each of the videos, I will make sure to include the links to all previous videos so that you can easily go back and review.

The presentation of these video tutorials is well done, and I was able to learn a quite a few tips on how to make my Blog Posts pop to the top of the online Search Engines.  They are all in Flash (.swf) format and will open in a new browser window.  You should have the latest flash viewer to watch them, but if not, your browser should prompt you for the appropriate plugin download.

Search Engine Optimization – Video 1

In this first video you will get an introduction to the Top 10 On Site SEO Fundamentals and how to implement them on your site.  They include the types of HTML formatting, and content you need to make your pages and posts search engine friendly.  The running time for this video is around 24 Minutes. 

In this tutorial I learned about the Traffic Travis tool for Keyword Research and SEO.  He spends almost half of the tutorial talking about it.  It is free and could prove to be a very valuable tool in your webmaster arsenal.

The author of this video knows his stuff, and gives evidence.  Let me know what you think about this series in the comments, or send me an e-mail.  What are your favorite SEO tips and tricks?

If you are interested I can make the set available to you.  They are in .swf format and the .zip files are still quite large.  Drop me an e-mail and we can work something out.

-Loren