Well it wasn’t an easy answer because I wanted to give our customers a recommendation that I felt was at least as good as MasterSiteManager.

And while I never would have admitted it while we were online, we did have a competitor that offered a very similar service with some extra “bells and whistles” that MSM just didn’t have.

After testing all our competitors software personally, I kept coming back to one particular company because they simply offered the best tracking, ease of use, interface and pricing.

Yes they are  $5.00 more expensive then we were at the Starter level, but it offers some very cool features that we didn’t and is well worth the incremental price difference.

However, they do offer a free trial account that will let you track 1 URL and up to 10 keywords, which is all some people really need.

Click here to view my recommendation.

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.

But for those of you that wished we offered more “drill down functionality”, we’ve got you covered.

To be honest, it’s not so much a change in the way our software works, but rather “how” you can go about using it.

Here’s what we mean…

Some of the feedback we’ve received suggested that we offer “page specific keyword tracking”.

In other words, some people have asked,  “Where do I rank for my chosen keywords on a specific page within my web site?”

Many people thought that you couldn’t track internal pages using MasterSiteManager, but you actually can, and it’s super easy!

With MasterSiteManager, you can track ANY URL.

This means, you can track things like your root domain, HubPages, Squidoo pages, Articles you posted or syndicated  – anything… and this includes internal pages or blog posts too!

Here’s how it works:

Setting up your account to track specific pages WITHIN your blog or site for example and not just the root domain is easy.

1. Simply login to your account and go to the “Manage Web Sites Tab” then click the “Add new URL” button.
2. Now simply type in the full URL that you want to track.
3. Next, click on the “SEO Stats” tab at the top of the page
4. Next click on the “Keywords” link for the URL you just added.
5. Finally, click the “Add Keywords” button and type or paste in a list of the keywords you want to track.

The system will then pull the stats for that URL and where that INTERNAL PAGE ranks for each of the keywords you’ve entered.

As you can see it doesn’t matter what the url is. Once you put a specific URL into the MSM system, any keywords you add will be tied to that particular URL, and not your root domain.

How cool is that? Let us know what you think!

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.

Why is it important?

Because good link popularity can dramatically increase traffic to your web site. Well placed links are an excellent source of consistent and targeted traffic. And due to recent developments, they can even generate additional search engine traffic to your site.

Most of the major search engines now factor Link Popularity into their relevancy algorithms. As a result, increasing the number of quality, relevant sites which link to your site can actually improve your search engine rankings. There is still no one “secret trick” to getting good rankings, but boosting your site’s popularity may give it the edge it needs.

Knowing who links to your site and increasing the number of quality links is an important part of any web site promotion effort.

This pages are considered supplemental results, and returned in SERPs only if there are no pages from the main index matching the given search term(s).

The Supplemental Index Ratio tells you what percentage of pages indexed from your website are supplemental results.
The lower your Supplemental Index Ratio is, the better.

How Can I Lower My Supplemental Index Ratio?

The primary solution is to get more relevant inbound links.
Some other suggested solutions are

• Avoid duplicate content
• Write long posts
• Avoid linking at bad neighborhood
• Avoid excessive reciprocal links

1. Site structure
   Make sure your subpages are easily accessible by search engine bots. Create a sitemap page that links to all pages of your website and place a link to it from the homepage. If you have a large website, break the sitemap up in several parts and keep the total link number under 100 per page. Link from your homepage to deep pages to get them and the sites around them crawled faster.
2. No session IDs
   Get rid of session IDs. Bots rarely index pages with a session IDs because they think that those are different pages (because of the different IDs) with the same content.
3. No variables in the URLs
   Avoid variables in the URL. They are indexed slowly and often getting no PageRank. Use Apache’s mod_rewrite feature to convert your dynamic pages to static. Redirect all old pages to the new ones with a 301 redirect. Note however that if you do that for your established website, search engines will need some time to crawl the new static pages.
4. Get links !
   Inbound (incoming) links are half of the SEO battle nowadays. Your website needs links from quality, on topic websites. The higher your PageRank the faster and deeper your website will be crawled by bots. Get links not only to your home page, but also to the deep pages. Make sure the spiders can find your site from different places.

The sneaky trick he is using is actually pretty creative – though I don’t think I’d be brave enough to use it. It involves using “Framesets” to trick Google….

Now Jonathan isn’t advocating this technique in his post, (wink wink) and that he’s just recognizing the cleverness of his affiliate and giving credit where credit is due, but there are some dangers here to following the in this affiliates footsteps as you’ll see in a moment.

IF you were to follow down this path and use a browser frameset to show Google something different then what a real user would see – I personally think you are living on borrowed time.

Here’s how it works:

<html>

<head>
<title>PAGE TITLE</title>
<META name=”description” content=”product description”>
<META name=”keywords” content=”product keywords”>
</head>
<frameset rows=”100%,*” border=”0″>
<frame src=”http://myaffiliatelink.com/” frameborder=”0″ />
<frame frameborder=”0″ noresize />
</frameset>

<body>
<div>
(250 WORDS OR SO OF UNIQUE CONTENT GO HERE)

</div>
</body>
</html>

In a nutshell what is happening here is that by using a frameset in the section of the page ABOVE the BODY tag, you redirect the visitor to your affiliate link, while at the same time also adding the requisite amount of unique content that Google wants to see INTO the BODY of the page.

As a result Google ends up counting that the text in the BODY as content on the page, BUT web browsers won’t and just ignore it so the visitor doesn’t ever actually see it.

On the surface it’s pretty clever way of gamming the system however it is not without risk.

First of all let me say, never, did I say NEVER do this on a domain that you want to keep indexed because Google WILL deindex your site if and when their manual reviews find it.

And trust me they WILL find it, if you are absolutely dominating the serps because your competitors and OTHER affiliates will turn you in.

The fact is that doing something like this is considered “Black Hat” SEO and is a clear breech of Google’s terms of service because in effect you are putting text on a page that the end user cant see  – and doing so in order to rank the site.

These type of tricks do work short term – but in the long term the hassle of having to set up a new domain and get it ranked and the new pages indexed makes it not worth the effort.

On the other side of the coin – if you used this technique on what I call a “throw-away” domain, and you managed to squeeze out a few grand before Google hammers the site, well… it just might be worth it.

You make the call.

Let me know what you guys think?

And surprisingly Yahoo’s gains were largely at the expense of Google sites, which lost 1% of search market share month-over-month. Google is still the front-runner with 61.6% of the search market. But for how long?

As you already know, Bing and Yahoo don’t supply the majority of the traffic to your site, but they do drive highly targeted traffic. And that’s pretty significant.

In fact, over all Yahoo! and Bing users will stay on your site an average of 23% longer then someone who came to you from Google.

At a recent SEO Conference (SES SF) it was said “Yahoo and Bing are merging. They’ll be 100% merged by the end of August or the beginning of September.

This is actually a pretty big deal and something that web masters and business online can no longer ignore. not something to ignore anymore. If you do, you’ll be missing out on 10 to 12 percent of traffic.”

How To Take Advantage of the Yahoo! / Bing Marriage:

1. Bing favors domain names that have some age on them. Don’t make the mistake of  giving up a domain name with good history and start again. Instead, use the aged domain as your “money site” and then use newer “keyword rich domain names” as feeder sites in your own link network.

2. Titles are of first importance when it comes to on-page optimization. Bing clearly places a lot of importance on Title tags and what they say about your site.

To leverage this make sure you use your best keywords in the title tags of every page on your site. But don’t just stuff the keywords in in the title tag, just to have them there.

Remember, your title tag isn’t just for the search engines. Use it to “Sell the click” as our friend Jerry West from WebMarketingNow.com says.

Making your title tag stand out from the rest of the serp results will increase traffic and conversion over keyword stuffing the title tag alone.

3. Bing seems it also places a higher value on pages that have at least 300 words. We’ve spoke with a number of trusted SEO guru’s who have confirmed this and in fact report that 1,200 words  is actually the magic number to shoot for.

4. Link popularity is your #1 off page SEO strategy bar none. Conventional SEO advice says that your backlinks need to be from relevant sites and or related sites. But the fact is, it’s just not true with Google (at all) and not true with Yahoo! Bing on the other hand does want to see this sort of relevancy, but if they join with and use the Yahoo! database, all bets are off.

When it comes to link building, get links where you can get them and try to get a mix of links. Relevant links offer the added advantage of long term “future proofing”your SEO efforts, but don’t over look any non relevant link because they work too.