Here’s what I mean. If your domain isn’t set up correctly from the get go, you are absolutely sabotaging your potential success and search engine rankings – because people are stupid or just lazy.

When a web site is set up on a web host, the web host or the domain owner needs to set up a 301 redirect for new site / domain so that the non-www. url points to the www versionn of the domain OR visa versa.

Many hosts do this automatically.  However, WordPress for example often installs without the “www” by default.

What this means is that IF you go directly to www.domain.com AND domain.com (no www) then the site is not set up correctly on the server, and your rankings will suffer for it.

Here’s why – Google will come and spider BOTH versions of the domain, because it’s sees TWO unique sites addresses.

The problem is that both sites contain the same content so you get whacked for duplicate content.

Now some people will say that there is no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty” and they validate their argument by pointing out the curation model  used by news aggregation sites like Mashable.com. And they’d be right at least in part.

There is no duplicate content penalty on the web. However there IS “on-site”. What makes this worse is that the www and the non-www versions of your site that Google sees are EXACT copies and that will cause a problem.

Interestingly though that’s not your biggest issue.

The real issue as I see it is “Link Dilution.”

The term “Link dilution”  is where you have other sites linking to you naturally because they like your site, they think you offer good value or because they’re talking about you or a comment you’ve made on your blog for example.

Now that doesn’t concern us really, what does though is HOW other people are linking to those sites.

Some people might link directly to the “www version” and some might link to the non “www version” of the site.

In other words, since people are sending link juice to both sites, neither site is getting all the link love it should be getting.

What this does when combined with Google spidering both versions (they see 2 sites remember) is that Google generates KW rankings for EACH site.

The problem is easy to fix though.

1) CHOOSE which version of your site you want to use – with our without the WWW.

2) Make sure that your web hosts uses a 301 redirect on the version you are NOT using, and have that unused version of your domain point TO the version of your site that you’ve chosen in Step #1.

In other words if you decide that default for your site is going to use the www prefex (http://www.yourdomain.com) then you want to go into your online web hosting control panel and set up a 301 redirect for the non-www version of the domain so that it points to the www.version.

Here’s how to check if this redirect is already set up on your existing site. (We’re going to assume the domain is set up to use “www” as the default in this case)

Go to your web browser and type in “http://yourdoman.com”

Now if your web hosting account is set up correctly, what you’ll see appear in your browser window is the http://www.yourdomain.com version of the site.

If however, the redirect doesn’t happen you should set one up ASAP. It’s not difficult to do -  especially if your web host uses CPanel – you can always just call your hosting provider and have them set it up for you. It takes less then 2 minutes.

So Google uses the name “allinanchor rank” and provides us with a special command that you can use in your browser to “look up” the allinachcor rank of any site.

The purpose behind this is that the allinanchor rank shows you which site has the most back links in the keyword phrase with the actual links pointing to their site.

Now some may argue with me on this but I feel that a web pages “allinanchor” rank is the single most critical measurement in determining how well a particular page will rank in the SERPS.

Reason being is because it takes into consideration not just the quantity of links to a web page, but also (and more perhaps more importantly) how many links are relevant based on the keyword or keyword phrase that is used within the link.

To use Google’s “allinanchor:” command to discover what your website or your competitor website’s allinanchor ranking is easy.

Simply type in the search box of Google: allinanchor:keyword phrase

Other helpful, but less important  link commands that you can use to see who’s got links from pages that ALSO contain the keyword or keyword phrase in the Page Title, Text and URL as well.

These are:

1. allinurl:keyword phrase
2. allintitle:keyword phrase
3. allintext:keyword phrase

The bottom line is that SEO is actually pretty simple once you understand what it takes to win a #1 ranking in Google for your chosen keyword or keyword phrase.

So when doing SEO on your site or a clients site, your most important job is to get the lowest allinanchor ranking as possible.

Your goal is to get your allinanchor rank to #1 – meaning your site has the best “allinanchor ranking” for your keyword phrase. Another way to look at it is that if you obtain an allinanchor ranking of “1″, that
means, that you win.

In other words, you need to get more sites linking to your site, using your keyword AS the link text, then do your competitors and you win!

AND if you can also get a number 1 for the allinurl, allintitle, allintext for your keyword or keyword phase as well consider it game over. You will OWN the top spot.

Next time I’ll talk about how you can use some fancy mojo in MasterSiteManager to make compiling this data super easy!

What is Traffic Rank?

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach).

As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.

The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users).

The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago.

For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.

What are sites and Web hosts?

Traffic is computed for sites, which are typically defined at the domain level.

For example, the Web hosts www.msn.com, carpoint.msn.com and slate.msn.com are all treated as part of the same site, because they all reside on the same domain, msn.com.

An exception is personal home pages, which are treated separately if they can be automatically identified as such from the URLs in question.

Also, sites which are found to be serving the “same” content are generally counted together as the same site.

What is Reach?

Reach measures the number of users.  Reach  is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users”+” who visit a given site.

So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that”+” 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com.

Alexa expresses reach as number”+” of users per million. Alexa’s one-week and three-month average”+” reach are measures of daily reach, averaged over the specified”+” time period.

The reach rank is a ranking of all sites based solely”+” on their reach.

The three-month changes are determined by comparing”+” a site’s current reach and reach rank with its values from three month ago.

What are Page Views?

Page views measure the number of”+” pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users.  Multiple page views of”+” the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted”+” only once.

The page views per user numbers are the average numbers”+” of unique pages viewed per user per day by the users visiting”+” the site.  The page view rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on the total number of page views (not page views per user).

The three-month changes are determined by comparing a sites current”+” page view numbers with those from three month ago.

Page views per million indicates what fraction of all the page views by toolbar users go to a particular site.

For example, if yahoo.com has 70,000″+” page views per million, this means that 7% of all page views go to yahoo.com.

If you summed the fractional page views over all sites, you would get 100% (this is not true of reach, since each user can of course visit more than one site.

For example we look up your site in the format:

“http://www.yourdomain.com”

Remember, you want to compare apples to apples here, so it’s very important to put both the “http://” AND the “www”  in your domain so that you are looking up your site the same way we do.

If you play around with it and do your searches in Yahoo for example, you’ll see the effects using the “http” and the “www” when searching vs., not using them. The differences are really quite dramatic.

We’ve done a lot of testing and found this format to be the most accurate.

But What If Your SEO Results Still Don’t Match Ours?

There are few other things that could be contributing to this.

Sometimes the results you’ll see are different based on geography and from what data center your ISP is getting its results from especially if you’re located outside of the United States (all of our look up servers are currently located in the U.S.)

Other times it might be that we looked up the results a few days ago and they’ve changed.

An easy thing to do is just press the “Update Stats” button in your control panel. Then see if this doesn’t fix the problem. 9 times out of 10 it will.

If your results are still not matching up, use the support contact form and let us know about it.

It’s something we can take a look and get fixed for you.

Just go to the log-in page and click on the “Forgot Password” link and your password will be emailed to you.

“Why isn’t my site the first result on Google or any other search engine?”

Well, the answer is simple, and not one that they really want to hear.

The fact is that it is extremely difficult to be the first result on Google or any other search engine.

This article should help first get your site indexed and listed on a search engine.

There are thousands of search engines out there, but only a small fraction of them are likely to send you more than a couple hundred of visitors each month.

Instead of submitting your site to as many search engines as possible, please focus your energy on the top four.

• Google
• Yahoo
• Bing
• Ask

Though honestly, Google is KING. Combine ALL the other traffic you get from Yahoo, Bing and Ask, and it still won’t equal what you get from Google.

Having said that, once you have narrowed down your focus, SOME SEO “experts” will tell you to submit your site to your chosen search engines.

Don’t. Because it’s the SLOWEST way to get your site indexed. In fact, Google even has a little penalty that smack you with if you submit directly.

You are FAR better off just buying a text link from a high profile site for a month or two. You’ll get indexed faster and the results are much more likely to stick.

But if your web master “insists” on submitting your site directly to the search engines, here are some tips:

1: Do NOT spam the search engines. Once you submit your site to a search engine, don’t submit it again the next day — they got your submission.If you continue to bother them with “hey look at my site” submissions, you risk having your site banned and have it never get a listing at all. Some times it will take up to 2 – 8 weeks for your site to get fully indexed and listed properly.

2: Be patient! For the most part, you do not need to re-submit your site over and over again. If you make some major changes or additions to your site, there is no harm in re-submitting it 3 months later, but not every week.

Now “old school” advice is to add what’s called a “revisit tag” to your pages, but it’s a waste of time. If you’re getting back links to your site (and you should) the search engine spiders or bots will revisit your site automatically – often coming by several times a day at first.

Doing so helps the engine determine the frequency at which you post new content. The more often you post, the more often they will revisit.

Hopefully, you have planned your website launch and previously optimized your site for search engines. If you have not done this yet, you should still have some time to do this.

“Optimizing” for search engines – search engine optimization – means having the right things in the right places so that spidering programs (also known as “robots”) get the information and impressions about your site that you want them to get.

Make sure you have the right meta tags, keywords and the right content on each page.

They say things to themselves like:

“I already use a bunch of SEO tools and software now” or “I can get all the same tools you provide for free at this web site over here, …etc...”

If that sounds like you, I totally get it. I really do. But consider for a moment that you might be missing the “forest for the trees” as they say.

I say this because believe it or not, Master Site Manager really has nothing to do with SEO – per say.

Excuse me? Ok, Don now you’re just talking crazy!

No, seriously it’s true. Stay with me for a moment…

You have to “grasp” this concept right away or you won’t realize the real value inherent in using MasterSiteManager.com, and you waste HOURS every month doing what you’ve always done when it comes to search engine rank checking and monitoring.

MasterSiteManager.com provides many tools to help get your site ranking higher in the search engines, HOWEVER the REAL function of our software is to SAVE YOU TIME.

Look, if you’re like most people doing SEO, you’re spending lot’s of time bouncing between software programs & web sites just to get all the tracking stats you need.

I personally know SEVERAL high profile professional SEO’s who literally spend two hours a day gathering and tracking this stuff!

Well, I should say that they “used to spend two hours a day… Not anymore”

But now you don’t have to use a bunch of different software programs and or web sites to get the SEO stats you need because everything you need is right here in your MasterSiteManager.com control panel.

And that’s the beauty of Master Site Manager.com. ALL your external stats are at your finger tips – making it super easy to see INSTANTLY exactly how well your site(s) are doing.

I know, I know, it sounds like a commercial, but in a way it is. Because instead of spending hours collecting your back link totals, keyword rankings and all the other data you need, use Master Site Manager and get the info you want “at a glance!”

Regardless if you just want to get a “10,000″ foot overview of your stats, or you want to drill down and get specifics – its all there for you.

Take a moment and think about how much time you’ll save doing it this way instead of the way you used to do it.

What’s that going to mean to you and your business, or your clients?

So log in and add your site(s) to your account right now.

It only takes a few minutes to save hours.

You can log into your account here:

http://www.mastersitemanager.com

Till next time,

Don Schnure
Master Site Manager.Com
http://www.twitter.com/MSMSEO

The problem is that when you are using tools like MasterSiteManager.com you might not want your client to know how you are working your SEO mojo. So sending your client a report with some other companies logo on it just isn’t going to do you any good.

Not to worry, we’ve got you covered. MasterSiteManager SEO monitoring software was built with SEO Professionals in mind so we try to anticipate your needs in advance.

This video shows you how to add your own company logo to our keyword tracking reports in your new Master Site Manager.com SEO tracking account.

Now you can give your clients daily, weekly, or monthly reports (branded with your company name) that show them exactly how well their web properties and keyword rankings are doing. You’ll never again have to “try to justify” what you bill your clients, because they can see for themselves just how effective your efforts are.

When you add a note the system will add a date stamp and for you automatically.

The advantage here is that over time you’ll develop an SEO diary of sorts that allows you to be able go back in time and see what you are doing when your rankings changed for the better or worse.

Listen, let me tell you something. The very best as search engine optimizers on the planet keep a diary of what they did and when.

Now some guys may call it a journal or a log. And they may keep this information in a notebook, or perhaps a spreadsheet.

I don’t care what you call it or where you record the information, the point is if you don’t keep a written record of what you’re doing while trying to optimize for a particular keyword, then honestly you’ll never learn if what you’re doing is working or not.

Having said that keeping a journal, or logbook of sorts is really a pain especially when you’re trying to track dozens, hundreds or maybe even thousands of keywords.

As a result most people don’t bother.

But if you’re not keeping track of what you’re doing and when you do it when it comes to SEO, are guys out there like Jerry West, Dan Thies and Leslie Rohde who are and who (as Dan says) just waiting to eat your lunch.

With our special notes feature, we make it easy for you to pop in and make a quick note about pretty much anything as it relates to your websites.

Did you buy a few new text links on that particular day, or maybe change the title tag or two? Then enter it as a note in your account and you’ll have a record of its to compare against the trending charts when you check your keyword rankings.

Adding notes to any URL your account is very easy.

1. Simply login and click the “MANAGE WEBSITES” tab at the top of the page.
2. Next look for the column marked “ACTIONS”.
3. Then click the icon with the little red pencil on it and a NOTES window will pop up where you will enter in your notes.

When you start typing, or click your mouse within the notes box, the system will automatically add a date stamp for you.

From then on, each time you go to make a new entry, the system will add the current date, thus allowing you to develop a diary of notes over time.

I really can’t stress how important this feature is . If you’re not keeping a journal of your SEO changes then you are not being nearly as effective as you could be.

Watch the video here