Till the date, you must have developed number of websites for yourself and must have designed such a good website that you can attract many website viewers but the fact still remains unclear somewhere in your mind that why are you not getting the business that you must have got with such excellent websites, right? If the answer is yes, there is a good time for you to think on adding a piece of code that adds a hit counter in your website. Hit counter is nothing but a counter that keeps the record of number of times your website has been visited. It is just a small piece of code that can be added into your website to implement hit counter.

Now, there must be a new question in your mind, what would be the advantage of adding an additional piece of code in such a heavily loaded website, right and what would be the additional cost for the same? To add an amusement factor in your thoughts, let me tell you that there is no cost of getting this piece of code and there are many websites providing the free hit counters. Now, let us discuss about the advantages provided by website hit counters.

As I said, the basic advantage is about getting the figure of visitors visiting your website but that is not the actual advantage. The actual advantage is the analysis provided by website hit counters. The analysis includes the kind of people visiting your website as well as part of world that is visiting your website. With such a classy analysis, you would be able to make out the class of visitors visiting your website and you would certainly be able to make out the strategy to attract other class of people to your website by providing them with their interest of activity on your website. This would definitely get you more traffic.

Now, this is not the end of analysis. Another analysis would give you the reports of particular class of visitors on particular time. This would help you in a way that you would be able to make out the time of period when certain kinds of visitors are coming to your website. Accordingly, you can set the priority to the task they love to do on their particular time.

I am sure, now you are pretty much convinced about getting that piece of code into your website, isn’t it? Just go and search for them on Google and within minutes, you will get them for free.

There is a good concept called hit counter and web analytics. If you want to know about web analytics, it is important to understand the concept of hit counters first. Let me first explain hit counter. Hit counter is nothing but a counter that counts the number of visitors visiting a website during a day, a week, a month and a year. It actually gives you the fact figure of getting the number of visitors on your website, every time your website is being clicked by a web browser and Web Analytics is the concept which is associated with hit counter. So, let us begin with understanding the concept of web analytics.

Web Analytics is nothing but an explored view of hit counter which means understanding the class of people visiting on your website from which part of the world and around what time of the day. Let me elaborate more on those complex words. I am sure there would be certain kind of people visiting your website and not all. For example, you cannot expect football lover to visit on a website of a game like billiards or snookers. So, analyzing this fact would help you to plan a strategy to attract people who actually love billiards and would help you to plan for longer run.

Second thing was about certain visitors from the certain part of the world. Correct, if you would analyze, you would find that there are particular people only from few countries would be visiting your website. Now, that is not going to add advantage to your website. But, based on this analysis, you could target to develop some functionality for people from other countries to get interest in your website. You can plan different activity on your website to attract such visitors on your website.

Now, let us concentrate on the time analysis. The web analytics would also provide you with the time in a day when the kind of people visiting your website. This means, you would see in the analysis that at particular time on a day, there would be certain kind of people who would be interested in playing game on your website for an example. With this kind of analysis, you would be able to give priority to certain applications at certain point of time on your website to gain more advantage.

I am sure that you would have understood the concept of web analytics with hit counter by reading this article. In addition, you could easily be able to grab the hit counter on your website for free.

If you have gained an insight into the SEO world, you would have come across the word “backlinks” several times. For those new to the SEO industry, you might wonder what backlinks are and how essential they are for the success of websites.

In short, a Backlink indicates a link from another site to your website. These are also known as inbound links and their number indicates the popularity of the website. Backlinks are considered as votes by search engines: more the number of votes (backlinks) your website has, and based on the importance of websites linking back to yours, your site is assigned a trust rank.

Backlinks today are an important part of the SEO process because when you build quality backlinks, your website stands a higher chance of getting indexed faster by the search engines. Also, from the long term perspective, it will help in boosting quality traffic to your site. Apart from this, building backlinks serves your bottom-line of website visibility by improving your page ranking and ultimately your ranking in the search engines.

Additionally, it is not just enough to have lots of backlinks, but, it’s also the quality of backlinks that helps in achieving a better ranking in search engines. When calculating the relevance of a website to a particular keyword, search engines usually take into consideration the number of quality backlinks to that website.
Search engines like Google give a lot of importance to websites that contain more number of quality backlinks and also consider those websites as more relevant when compared to others in search results.

A backlink is considered as a quality link if:

a) It links back to your site with the keyword which you are optimizing for.

b) The website linking back to yours has the same theme as your website – this means that when your website contains an inbound link from another site, and that site has content related to your website, this inbound link will be considered as more relevant to your website. However, if this inbound link comes from a site that is totally unrelated to your site content, then it is considered as a less relevant backlink. Therefore, higher the relevancy of backlinks, the greater will be their quality.

For instance, if you have a website about furniture and you receive an inbound link from another website also containing furniture, then this backlink will be considered more relevant and of higher quality when compared to a backlink from a florist website.

Today, search engines watch out for websites that build quality backlinks slowly over time. Though it is quite easy to maneuver links on webpage’s in order to attain a high ranking, it is much tougher to manipulate search engines with inbound links from other sites. This is also one of the reasons for backlinks gaining increased importance in search engine algorithms. Recently, search engines assessment for quality backlinks has become even tougher as there are many webmasters out there who make use of unethical techniques and deceive search engines to attain a higher ranking. These techniques are not only illegitimate but can also lead to your site getting banned.

Lastly, building quality backlinks could be a very time consuming and tedious process requiring a lot of patience, efforts, and also funds. However, it is a crucial step in creating blogs or any website since the quality and relevancy of backlinks can determine the success or failure of the site. Therefore, it is very important that you prioritize this in your SEO activity and hire professional SEO experts to whom you can outsource this task and achieve a better search engine ranking.

Even if you are armed with all the knowledge of SEO, you might and probably still need the services of a good SEO company. Having a good knowledge about SEO is hardly enough sometimes. Even if you are doing your best to try to get a good ranking for your site, you may still end up wondering why your site is just not doing well. For starters, you should be aware that your site will need to be optimized in all aspects. Not only that, your site needs to be maintained in a regular basis. SEO is an ongoing process that involves a lot of time and effort. To make things easier, you will be better off hiring the services of a good SEO company to do the work for your site.

There are many SEO companies today, and there are just as many reliable companies as unreliable ones. Thus, it is very important that you choose the right SEO company. Here are a few points that you should keep in mind when selecting SEO services:

Site Analysis Report

Does the SEO company provide you with a website analysis report? A reliable SEO company will be able to provide you with a comprehensive analysis of your site in terms of ranking and design to give you an idea of how much work needs to be done. They should be able to inform you of any elements in functionality, content and design that may hamper in the reading and indexing of your pages.

Providing Qualified Traffic

Do they understand the difference of plain traffic and qualified traffic? You will hire the services of an SEO company mainly because you need to attract traffic into your site. However, what you want is qualified traffic that gets customers who may be genuinely interested in availing of your products and services. You do not want unqualified traffic that comes to your site because of irrelevant keywords. Unqualified traffic only increase your bounce rate (surfers that land on your page and leave) and not your sales

Tools in Determining Keywords

What tools does the SEO company use to search for keywords? You also need to know what methodology the SEO company uses for keyword analysis. You may also want to do your own research on usual basic tools and those provided by Google AdWords, for example.

Back Link Collection

From where will the SEO company get back links from? Back links are just as, if not more, important in SEO then onsite optimization. What you would like is to get back links from good sites and sites that are closely related to your niche. Ask your SEO company what their methods are for collecting back links.

Cost Structure

A reliable SEO company will only give you a quotation as soon as they find out just how much work needs to be involved. Charging you high prices may not always necessarily ensure you high quality of services. Make sure that the price being quoted is proportional and consistent with the services that you can expect your SEO company to provide.

The Timeline

Does your SEO company offer you a timeline? It is only through hard work and proper planning that results can be achieved right on time. Some companies offer SEO packages that claim to put you in the first page search result in just a matter of 10 days. Realistically though, no SEO company can possibly guarantee you the number 1 ranking in Google in as short as 10 days. This is one of the basic guidelines actually published by Google. Make sure you do not give in to false promises. Conversely, avoid SEO services that will give you time limit. A good SEO company knows that optimization is an ongoing process and they will need to provide you with regular maintenance jobs, customer service and proper updating. An SEO campaign will take 3-6 months before seing the top results you expect.

SEO Strategy

What SEO strategy will your SEO company use to raise your ranking? You should look out for companies which will use spam advertising strategies to get you on top in no time. If the plan involves some form of unethical practice such as spamming or deceiving search engines, immediately walk away. A good SEO company will make sure that you will not be subjected to spam or deceptive services. Remember that if it is based on deceitful tactics, your site may simply be pulled out of Google’s indexing and will lead you to trouble. Knowing your SEO company and doing your own research are very important in choosing the right firm.

It is important that you choose your SEO company very well before hiring one. This will save you from losing some of your precious time and money. If you choose the wrong one and get poor service, imagine how potentially wasteful it would have to be to do everything all over again.

Everyday, there are thousands of online entrepreneurs who spend thousands just to get a few minutes of time offered by an SEO company or an SEO coach. They wonder why their SEO attempts don’t seem to work despite all the cash they spend. On the other hand, there are also those who enjoy SEO success and are happy with the services of the SEO company they hired. Well, the point is, you will need some guidance from an SEO company if you want to make a real headway on the web.

When you hire an SEO company to help you increase traffic into your site, you should have a realistic mindset and remember that success can only be achieved with time and with constant hard work. You must avoid those which tell you otherwise at all times, or you are bound to make a mistake. Here are some questions to help you through the decision making process. These are realistic, real-world questions that will help you screen an SEO company thoroughly. Remember that you need to recognize a true expert from a thief and decide accordingly.

Questions to help you recognize whether the SEO company can do the job for you

Will you be implementing the SEO project or do I need to do the dirty work myself?

This is a question best asked upfront. There is of course no right and wrong answer to these questions. This question can only help you weed out those who are not inline with your goals and with your expectations. You need to know whether your SEO company will actually make the project happen as you want them to or if you should expect to do the work yourself. The SEO company usually will ask you to pay additional for implementation of the project before they devote time and effort into your site.

What services do you pride yourself for?

If you are really lucky, you will find an SEO company which is good at one or even two aspects of online marketing. Asking an SEO company this question will caught them in an off guard position and will help you gauge their honesty. Watch out for companies which claim that they are good at each and every aspect of online marketing.

What do you like doing online?

The last thing you would need is a starving SEO consultant who does not enjoy working on SEO but only need to do so for the money. They will take your project and suddenly realize how much they hate what they do and your project suddenly takes forever to complete, if it does. Remember that SEO is a time-consuming process that needs dedication and effort. The mere process of writing content pages will take some time and good skills. You need to make sure that your SEO company can offer you these during the implementation process.

Questions you need to ask yourself

Do the SEO company and me think alike?

You will be better off not hiring an SEO company which have a different set of business philosophies than you do. If you want to be interactively involved in the planning of your SEO project, you need to choose an SEO company that will appreciate the fact that you are sticking around and doing the work with them. On the other hand, do not hire one that will write a copy for you and you end up editing most of the words. What you want is an SEO that will work with you and you will like working with.

Will I enjoy working with this SEO company long term?

What you want is a pleasing business relationship with the SEO company that you choose. You would want fun-loving, energetic and happy people who are inspiring to work with. Try to check whether you like the mood of all the members of the SEO firm. Better yet, ask your consultant what he likes doing on his free time. This may be a strange question to ask but you will know a grump based on what he does on his free time.