Most website owners check their ranking from time to time, many of us do it a lot more often. There are a handful of free online tools as well as a number of desktop applications for this task. Most of the free online tools are pretty limited and the desktop applications usually cost a hefty chunk of change.

We’ve tried just about every tool out there and I can honestly say that few are as useful as the one Aaron Wall from SEO Book developed. It’s a Firefox rank checker plugin that can import and export data, adjust the query rate and save multiple profiles, plus, it’s free!

You can see a quick overview of the plugin in action in this video:

Hi, it looks like you're new here. You may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting and feel free to link to us! (This box will dissapear after you've visited a few pages)

Your website should not be a static marketing tool that simply gets implemented and then ignored. Instead, it should always be incrementally improving. We’re not talking about changing the design each month or even tweaking your meta tags. We’re talking about performance driven adjustments based on accurate data and testing. If you’re using analytics software, such as Google analytics, you’ve already got the information that you need to get started. If not, you need to start using it now.

Some of the more important factors to look at are your bounce rate, keyword phrases and website that are sending you traffic and top entry pages. You should also look at your conversion ratios (the ratio of visitors to customers). Find one or two aspects of your website that need the most work and then focus on improving them first. You’ll need to accurately monitor your results, therefore, you can’t work on several aspects at once or you’ll introduce too many variables to determine which actions caused which results.

One area that a lot of companies are weak in is providing what their visitors are actually looking for. For example, if you run a business consulting firm and you find that most of your website visitors are looking for inexpensive information about setting up a new company, you may find that it’s easier and more profitable to develop an informational product that they can purchase rather than trying to sell them your consulting services. This model will scale as large as you like. Plus, once they buy one product from you, they will be more inclined to buy more products from you because a relationship and trust has been established. This can open the door to your more profitable products or services later. Every company has opportunities like this, it’s just a matter of investing the time to find them.

If you focus on making the most of your exisiting traffic instead of just trying to drive the greatest number of people to your website, you’ll find that your revenue will increase while your workload often decreases. When your website is performing optimally, you can start putting more energy into increasing your traffic, but remember that your website is always under construction.

In an effort to generate revenue from their website, many people are quick to slap AdSense and affiliate ads all over the place, often at the expense of the very content that the visitors came for in the first  place. Have no doubt, this is the quickest way to turn your visitors off. Advertising, in and of itself is not a bad thing in moderation and as long as it doesn’t detract from your message. So what is the right way to monetize your website then?

1. Keep your advertising to a minimum. Visitors are coming to your website for a reason and you can bet it isn’t to look at or click your ads. Besides, if your site is plastered with ads, none of them will stand out and your click-through ratios will suffer.
2. Keep your advertising relevant to your content.
3. Use the right type of advertising. PPC ads are fine for purely informational websites, but not for a company or ecommerce website. Competing PPC ads will detract from your credibility and message while driving traffic to your competitors.

When a visitor arrives at a page that no longer exists (that hasn’t been properly redirected) they are usually greeted by a 404 error page. They also sometimes also see this error page when a site search returns no results, an archive is empty or a number of other reasons.

Obviously, it is doing part of the job by letting them know that the page doesn’t exist, but if that’s where it stops, you’re missing a great opportunity to promote your products or services. Rather than just telling your visitors that the page doesn’t exist, you could turn your error page into a sales page for your most profitable products. Even if you’re only reaching 10 visitors a month this way, think of the potential. Especially since most of them will just click the back button if they don’t see something that they’re interested in right away.

One of the biggest factors in the credibility is often overlooked or omitted on many websites, but fortunately, is also a simple fix. That factor is contact information. This means an address and phone number, not just an email address.

People want to know that your company is real, not some fly by night scam. They want to know that even if they don’t intend to stop by your office or call, they still have the option. If you give them that option, something that is lacking on most websites, your credibility and conversions will increase immediately.

I buy something close to 99.8% of my domains from GoDaddy because of their outstanding customer service and prices, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that their CEO, Bob Parsons, is former US Marine. Before you buy your next domain name, you really need to watch his video on the top 10 tips to choosing a great domain name.

Joost de Valk wrote a great article on WordPress SEO covering tips from the very basic to the relatively advanced. You should check it out.

Everyone knows that inbound links are hard currency when it comes to search engine optimization. Most website owners do not have enough of these coveted gems because they often overlook quick and easy ways to earn them. For example, when a customer purchases something from your website they probably receive an order confirmation email. In his blog, Aaron Wall points out that this is a perfect opportunity to ask them to link to your website because you have already earned their trust.

If you’re not already taking advantage of this opportunity, what other opportunities are you missing out on? Which ones are you utilizing?

We are a strong advocate of the WordPress blogging platform, in fact we use it here. One of its strengths is that a wealth of plugins have been developed to accomplish a mind-numbing array of tasks. One of the latest plugins developed by Richard Miller gives you the ability to present a different message to new visitors, as suggested by Seth Godin. This can become a powerful tool in helping to differentiate your website from the billions of others out there.