I have searched high and low for a easy to use backlink checker and have finally found one.
This tool analyzes 1000 links attached to your site, this includes backlinks and inbound links these are all links to your URL. The tool shows the domain if they are top tier sites and lower tier. What they do is show them separately by different classes of URLs like .com, .net, .org Etc. It is NOT a IP backlinks checker. This is fast because it is based what the search engines see.

Give it a spin and you will love it.
If you find a tool that is easier to use than this one and has the same functionality please leave a comment and we will add it to the list as a great backlink checker.

Technorati Tags: backlink checker, inbound links

If you are a firefox lover (Like ME) you can now learn to spread the love. I have been using the new beta version of Google Chrome, I am happy to say that it is FINALLY turning into a GOOD Browser. They had the right idea of starting over and trying to create a FASTER and more simplistic browser but… We love our tools, we want to be able to tweek it and add our own little bells and whistles.
With the new release of Beta 4.0 you can now easily install themes, import bookmarks and even install a google toolbar (sort of). There is a pretty easy way, it all has to do with bookmarks!

I found a forum that talks about how to do so. Chrome Plugins

Here is a screen shot of me using the Google tools that you would normally see in the tool bar. I have organized them into folders on my toolbar.

Here are some of the best bookmarks to put on your tool bar in chrome.

Google Cache:

javascript :void((function(){var%20a=location.href.replace(/^http%5C:%5C/%5C/(.*)$/,”$1″);location.href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:”+escape(a);})())

Google Links:

javascript:void((function(){var%20a=location.href.replace(/^http%5C:%5C/%5C/(.*)$/,”$1″);location.href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=link:”+escape(a);})())
Pages Indexed in Yahoo:

javascript:void((function(){var%20a=location.href.replace(/^http%5C:%5C/%5C/(.*)$/,”$1″);location.href=”http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=”+escape(a);})())

Alexa Rank

javascript:void((function(){var%20a=location.href.replace(/^http%5C:%5C/%5C/(.*)$/,”$1″);location.href=”http://alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=”+escape(a);})())
Get More HERE Chrome Plugins

I am truly loving Google Chrome NOW> I think I will start using it as much as FIREFOX.

Technorati Tags: google tools

Developing a Website That Generates Traffic and Increases Sales

When you own a business, your website is one of your most important tools that can be used to reach new customers and generate higher sales.

Whether you have an established website that is not currently working for you, or you are a complete newbie to the online marketing world, improving your website so that it generates traffic and increases sales is the right thing for your business.

Without a high quality website that attracts visitors and provides you with a way to capture information, you are not using the Internet’s power to its full potential. The information below can provide you with an idea of why a good website is so important for your businesses’ bottom line.

Why is a Quality Business Website so Important?

A high-quality business website provides you with a way to capture the enormous amount of traffic that is on the Internet. It also makes your business more accessible to your customers.

It does this, by giving website users a way to contact you or find out valuable information about your products or services without having to get on the phone, and during non-business hours.

There are literally millions of people searching the Internet for various reasons on any given day. If you are not trying to capture some of those visitors, then you are losing out on many potential sales each month. Just as your store gives you a physical presence a high-quality website provides you with an online Internet presence.

Benefits of Having a Good Website

As a business owner, there are many benefits to having a quality website that is able to not only generate traffic but also increase sales for your company. The first benefit that a business website can provide you with is it enables you to have access to customers that you otherwise might not have contact with.

Without a website, you are only able to reach your potential market through traditional means, and not those potential customers that primarily use the internet for their purchase research.

By enlisting the help of an internet marketing service company, you can create a highly effective direct response website that enables you to reach out to Internet traffic.

By adding an opt-in form to a quality website, you can increase your earning potential each year by at least 20%. An opt-in form provides a means of capturing visitors’ contact information. This is very valuable as it will allow you to send current and potential customers information about promotions, important updates, and special sales events throughout the year.

The visitors on your list will be people that you know are already interested in the services that you are offering, and by sending out a sales message to them your rate of return will be much higher than with an untargeted ad in the newspaper.

One of the most important benefits that a business website provides is that it allows you to remain a step above your competition. If other related local businesses do not currently have websites, you are already reaching far more people than they are.

By creating a high-quality website that can generate massive traffic and drive sales, you are ensuring that your site will be listed before the competitions’ in the search engine rankings.

How to Develop a High Quality Business Website

Unless you are professional, the best way to develop a high-quality business website is to seek out an Internet marketing company or web designer that can create a customized plan for your business.

These companies have experience marketing to those online, and they can help your website by marketing it for targeted driven traffic, and ensuring that it gets ranked well within the search engine listings.

Off-line business owners can increase their revenue by creating a business website or revamping their old one. Without a high-quality site that is able to generate traffic and increase your sales, your online presence will do you no good. Enlist the help of a professional Internet marketing company to develop a website that will help your business thrive.

About the Author: Aaron Howard – For more information on website development and online marketing, contact Aaron Howard, Business Development Manager with CU Innovative Marketing at http://CUInMarketing.com.

If you ever want to get your blog read, then you need make sure you are note duplicating other peoples words and ideas into your blog or site. Why? Well Google defines duplicate content as “substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.”

Ya so… why is this bad? Well think of it this way. If you are trying to become the biggest and most used Search Engine, what would be your number one goal be? Well for me would to give my users the most relevent results to what they searched for. Now if I looked up a subject and all of the results that came back were the same do you think that people would feel that they are getting the selection that they wanted?

NOPE. So they would leave and go start using some other search tool. Hopefully now you can see why google wont allow duplicate websites and blog entries. They want to become the best. To be the best they need only to show the best results.

So get out there and put your thinking caps on and dont duplicate (steal) content from other peoples sites.
Write your own, be creative.

Technorati Tags: duplicate content, writing your own content

Guided navigation means more sales.

When designing an e-commerce site, retailers must consider how to get a shopper to the product she wants quickly. Site search is an important tool to accomplish this but can actually be slower because if they don’t put in the correct phrase it can show to many products.

A faster method that allows shoppers to drill down from category to features with great speed is a guided navigation tool. It can become an important element of the site experience because it gets shoppers to the products they want quicker that trying to spell Mississippi!

One strategy for improving guided navigation is to make the feature the mandatory starting point for any onsite product search. Site design and development firm Americaneagle.com Inc. has developed such a guided navigation system for Weathertech.com, a retailer of auto parts and accessories.

After navigating to the retail site, shoppers are required to enter the make, model and year of the vehicle for which they are buying accessories, or they can enter the product type. In both cases, shoppers select the required information from a pull-down menu. Shoppers that enter the make, model and year of the vehicle are shown product categories specific to that vehicle and can drill down further from that point by clicking on a category. Shoppers selecting a product are shown that product.

The change to guided navigation from open-ended site search boosted the retailer’s conversion rate from less than 6% to 10%, Americaneagle.com reports.

“The retailer wanted to improve the way shoppers search for products specific to a vehicle, as well as specific types of products, and decided that steering shoppers into guided navigation was the best way to eliminate the risk of having site search return unsatisfactory results,” says Americaneagle.com chief operating officer Mike Svanascini. “In the current economy, guiding shoppers to the products they are looking for in as few steps as possible is going to create a more satisfying shopping experience and boost conversion rates.”

based on an article from Internetretailer.com

So have you heard the BUZZ? you can now Blog and Text message together in one tool called Twitter.

Here are the Basics of Twitter:

Technorati Tags: basics of twitter, can I make money with twitter, how to make money with twitter, how to use twitter, what to put in your twitter profile

After putting a lot of thought into how to best use RSS feeds on your website and then creating them on your website, the next step is to promote them. As with any kind of marketing, where and how you advertise your website can determine the amount of visitors. The same applies to RSS feeds.

As you create your RSS feeds, keep in mind that the title should contain optimal search keywords. The more keywords contained, the more likely you are to have your feed come up when a particular search string is entered. This is not to say you should cram every possible keyword into the title of the RSS feed. Instead, keep in mind that you can have up to 15 different titles listed for the same link, article, content, etc. when creating the original RSS file.

Use descriptors to attract visitors to your site by tempting them to click on your feed. Think of text that will enhance your content, but not make it appear irrelevant. People are less likely to click on a RSS feed if it doesn’t fit their needs and wants. By keeping the descriptors concise, but also tempting, you will drive people to click on your link over someone else’s.

In keeping with the keyword search, don’t forget that you can now search by theme. Use this to your advantage and group your RSS feeds into themes. When submitting them to search engines, group the feeds into specific themes. This can help bring your feeds up more often when similar themes are searched.

When you add RSS feeds from other companies, you can tell your website how to react when the feed is clicked on. Rather than have visitors transported to the new site, have it come up as a new window. This will help lessen the chance your site visitors will leave your website completely.

People don’t use the back button as often, so it increases your chances of the person to continue to peruse your site if the RSS feeds pop up as new browsers.

As you design your RSS feeds, include your company’s contact information. This entails your website, any relevant contact information, and if possible, your logo. The more experience a person has with your website, the more frequently he or she will recall it when thinking of your products or services.

Consequently, it also goes to say you need to make sure the experience is a positive one because it goes the same way with a negative experience, except it deters visitors from returning.

Use your feed within your own site. By promoting it within your own website, you can improve its standing on external search engines. Search engines often return results by the most frequently clicked first. If you don’t have enough faith in your own RSS feed to include it in your website, why would anyone else want to subscribe to it? At the same time, RSS feed search engines often return results alphabetically.

Typically an English teacher would not count the word ‘A’ in a title when cataloguing it, but in RSS search engines, it is viewed as the first word of a title. Try to word your titles to begin with ‘A’ to improve their standing. As they are clicked on more and more, it will increase the feeds’ standings in other search engines.

In order to utilize your well written and constructed RSS feeds, remember to subscribe to them yourself. Nothing gives others’ faith in their content like seeing it on the originators’ website. Use keywords appropriately in titles because you can write multiple titles to fit the same content. You can also use themes to help capture the essence of your RSS feeds. Keep site visitors at your website by ‘instructing’ external RSS feeds to open in new browser windows.

Lastly, don’t forget to include your company’s contact information with the website in your feeds. The more often these are put out to the general population, the more exposure you will get.

Technorati Tags: article content, search engine optimization

For the past few years we have been hearing the idea that you will be able to walk up to a pop machine, put in a code on you phone and have credit your account and out comes a pop. Also you have heard about walking past a store like The GAP and have a coupon pop up on you phone from that store. Well 2009 is not going to be the year where this becomes a reality. But we are getting closer! You should start preparing your ad campaigns now.

Why now?

The more than sluggish evolution of mobile devices and mobile internet penetration have kept location-based advertising only a twinkle  in most online advertisers eyes.  But we have seen a few major vendors promise to a

• Verizon signed Microsoft to provide location-based services and advertising for mobile customers. Under the five-year agreement, Microsoft will manage search and display advertising for the mobile web, creating a one-stop shop for advertisers and ad agencies. Announcing the deal, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer promised to help advertisers reach consumers who are on-the-go more effectively.
• Google followed up last year’s provision of opt-in location awareness with Google Latitude, a feature that lets you see where your friends are. The search company has refused to comment on the prospects for advertising, but experts see Google as ideally placed to add a location layer to its ad algorithms; think Gmail ads on steroids.
• NAVTEQ released LocationPoint, an advertising platform that can deliver both display and interactive ads to mobile phones, personal navigation devices, and in-vehicle navigation systems. It’s working with Interpublic Group’s Emerging Media Lab to demonstrate location-based ad targeting. By the way, in 2007, Nokia bought NAVTEQ, one of the top providers of location info, for $8.1 billion, saying that the deal made sense because of the swift growth of location services.
• Ford Motor Co. announced Sync, technology that will connect cars to the mobile internet in order to receive traffic, directions, business search and other information. Ford expects to have 1 million SYNC-equipped vehicles on the road by the third quarter of 2009. Microsoft is its partner, so Ballmer’s boast likely covers the service: If you can search for an Italian restaurant, you can bet Microsoft will try to sell paid listings.

Technorati Tags: advertisements

The latest improvements come in the form of better search-term association and longer search results.

The search-term association improvement helps Google understand when search terms are related to other concepts that don’t necessarily contain the same words. Google makes use of this knowledge by providing searches related to the keywords entered at the bottom of its search results page.

I did a search for the phrase sunflower seeds. When I scrolled to the bottom of the page there has been added, “Related Search Results” this is a huge improvement to Google’s ability to keep people on the first page of results.

Google is taking great strides in data mining to improve what people see. It is kinda like your mom correcting you when you were a little kid learning to speak english. “We was at the store” no son it’s “We were at the store”

Google is just helping to search better.

Techy way of saying it:

The lengthening of search results snippets for searches with lots of keywords represents an attempt by Google to provide searchers with more context. The goal is to help searchers understand what the pages at the end of search results links are about. Reducing visits to pages that don’t really address a query means more satisfied users.

Technorati Tags: google search implrovments, search terms