Most savvy site owners have either Google Analytics or some other advanced tracking solution installed on their sites. Google Analytics offers extensive data about your visitors behavior for free which helps explain its immense popularity.

One feature of Google Analytics that is often over looked is Event Tracking. Event Tracking allows webmasters to easily track things such as file downloads, the clicking of external links and video views. Things that was once difficult to track. While the setup can be a bit confusing, viewing the data within Google Analytics couldn’t be easier. Read more…

For most sites, increasing your inbound link counts is important. But one aspect of link building that is often overlooked is not actually link building, it is making the most of the links you already have.

Have you ever stepped back and taken a look at your links? Often times when we do site audits we find opportunities to significantly improve the value of links that are already in place. Improving the quality of your existing links usually takes some time, but not usually much money. Read more…

Anyone who has seen one of my presentations knows that I am a die-hard MindJet Mindmanager user… in fact, I favour it over PowerPoint by far.

Some of my audiences have even requested more information on the product I use. Well, today, something special showed up in my mailbox… a 25% discount on all purchases at MindJet from November 29th to December 3rd, 2010. I immediately used the discount to upgrade from Mindmanager 8 to version 9

Click here for the discount: http://bit.ly/mindjetm

Tune in to Monday the 16th of August’s episode of SEO 101 on WebmasterRadio.FM where I (Ross Dunn) and my co-host John Carcutt interview Jon Henshaw and Taylor Pratt of Raven Internet Marketing Tools (affiliate link – this article is, however, a legit preliminary review).

In short, Raven Tools can help you with the following:

Website analytics, managing link building campaigns and tracking their success, search engine optimization, social media reputation and campaign tracking, keyword research, and… see more farther on as I outlined the list of features.

The August 16th show will delve into some of the unique (and very cool) reporting options and tracking functionality that Raven has integrated over the years. From discussing how Raven IM Tools has uniquely layered link building reports and ranking reports over top of your overall site analytics (powerful combination!) to learning more about their integration of bit.ly, social mention and other popular metrics providers, this show is well worth a listen. That said, here is a little more about the show and my experience with Raven Tools since we recorded the program. Read more…

If your site is currently treating unavailable pages (404 errors) like temporary redirects (302 redirects) you may not have any problems with the search engines but your site is losing out on some important advantages of a proper 404 error.

The Way a 404 Normally Works

This is how a 404 normally works on a website when a search engine, let’s use Google, visits a URL (i.e address) on your website that cannot be found that was previously spidered/indexed as functional:

1. The visit produces a 404 error from the server.
   A 404 error is  provided by your server when an Internet client (i.e. a browser, search engine, etc.) reaches a URL on your site that can not be produced by your server because it is no longer there or it is incorrect.
2. The first time Google encounters this 404 error, it does not remove your URL but it takes note the page is not available and the broken link/missing address will be mentioned in your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard for you to fix ASAP.
3. The second time Google encounters the 404 error it is a good bet the page will be removed from its index and the error will remain in your Webmaster Tools dashboard for fixing. Google will continue to find the broken link until it is fixed, at which point any associated rankings you had for this page can work their way back up to where they were.

Using a 302 Redirect Response Instead of a 404 Error Response

Here is the situation: when a search engine visits a URL that no longer exists, your server delivers a 302 redirect response instead of the proper 404 response. Read more…

If you have a blog or a website with a RSS (real simple syndication) feed and you haven’t heard of the new PuSH protocol then I have a treat for you. A little while back, Google announced a new open source protocol quirkily called PubSubHubbub, or PuSH for short. In Google’s own words PuSH is “a simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS.”

And now, without further adieu, here it is in English:
Read more…

Yesterday Google announced in the Webmaster Central blog the added expansion for images within XML Sitemaps.

By expanding your XML Sitemap to include images in the new format, this will allow Google to easily learn which images you consider important. With image related queries being performed at Google every day, this extra step may help you to benefit from a bit of increased image related traffic. Read more…

Although Chrome is relatively new it has become one of the easiest web browsers to interface with.

Kawsar Ali shares some of the top extensions for Google Chrome and for anyone using Chrome these are a worthwhile download. These extensions, “can help you increase your productivity and enable you to perform your jobs easier and faster.” I am highlighting a few of these below.

For those of you having many Social Network sites, Shareaholic converts the web page you are on into a short URL which allows you to share it across the social media sites you use to talk with your friends.

A few of my favourites are Evernote Web Clipper which will save me oodles of time as it saves the content of my clipboard along with a link back to the original page therefore I do not need to worry about forgetting to bookmark a certain page or image. Split Screen is perfect for viewing more than one page on the same window.

After reading 10 Google Chrome Extensions for Boosting your Productivity I am sure you will agree Chrome is indeed far ahead of the other web browsers.

I am in the midst of a project at the moment and I got distracted by a couple of interesting articles from Google that, I expect, are well worth the read for many of you:

25 Google Website Optimizer Tips for Better Product Pages

Segmentation with Google Website Optimizer = Testing on Steroids! Not all customers are created equal, nor should you deal with all customers equally. Testing different versions of your page or funnel is powerful. Testing different versions based on the type of visitors is even more powerful. There are different ways of doing this, but we recommend starting with BTBuckets or with these instructions.

5 Buzz Tips

Mute posts so they don’t get sent to your inbox. Comments on your posts and comments after your comments send buzz directly to your inbox. If you don’t want a lively conversation to keep appearing in your inbox as people reply to it, you can mute it. Click the arrow in the corner of a buzz post and select “Mute this post.”

Just a couple things to keep you reading…

Google Webmaster Tools is very useful for a number of things, but this article will focus on improving your inbound links and on site Page Rank.

Even the best webmasters sometimes have broken links on their site. Even the best webmasters sometimes move or delete a page without properly 301 redirecting the old URL to a new replacement. It happens all the time, but if the 404 error created by these mistakes is not addressed the website may not be living up to its full potential. Read more…