Tracking Website Traffic and Statistics

I, now, have a couple of websites I am working on to upgrade and drive traffic to:

Roots and Wings Education Services
Arborisan Woodcraft Inc.

These sites/businesses will be my first focus for marketing and sales. I have set up a spreadsheet for each website using Google Docs to track how my efforts are doing. The headings on the spreadsheets are:  date; monthly traffic to website; number of backlinks to website; Google page rank of website; Alexa rank of website; and a column each for the Google search engine rank for each of the top 10 keywords for the site.

I filled in one row for each website, yesterday, to establish my baseline, and I will use this spreadsheet to track changes in these stats once a month, on the first of the month, from now on. I can't remember who it was who suggested this as a first, rudimentary, tracking method, otherwise I would give credit where credit is due, so I apologize to the originator of this idea. In future, I will be more diligent about remembering to credit my sources.

The one difficulty I have with this spreadsheet, though, is that I haven't yet discovered a reliable, accurate method of determining how many back links a website has. If anyone knows of a good method, I would really appreciate if you would post a comment about it, not only for my sake, but for anyone reading this who might also be struggling with this.

In future posts, hopefully soon,  I will discuss my understanding of Google page rank, Alexa, how to use Google Analytics to determine what traffic is coming to your website, and why these are important things to track, for people who are brand new (even newer than I am) at internet marketing. When I say that I am a "new" internet marketer, what I mean is that I am new to actually doing Internet marketing. I have been learning about it for nearly a year, now, but I am just getting started in putting my learning into action which, of course, is one of the major keys to succeeding in anything, right? For anyone who is interested, I have been doing the bulk of my learning at Wealthy Affiliate University and Squidoo.

Added AdSense and Amazon Product Banner

Today I added Google AdSense and an Amazon contextual ads gadget to this blog. It took a bit of playing around with the Adsense options to get it to look nice - especially finding the right size. I ended up using the "120 X 200 Vertical Button" and used the "match template" colour scheme with a few modifications (that part was easy - just point and click, and the preview updates as you change the colour of each element). I also used some of the suggestions in this article about choosing the colour scheme for ads on your site.

Now to play around with the Amazon gadget to see what I can do with that...

Learning to Create Websites From Scratch

I have just found a website that has step-by-step tutorials for any web language I could possibly need:
http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp
The tutorials are very well laid out and very easy to understand - even for someone who has no knowledge or experience whatsoever. Each language has its own tutorial with its own index of chapters. From the looks of it, people who already have some knowledge could jump in at any topic, without having to start right at the beginning, but those who are just starting out can go through the chapters sequentially and be led by the hand step by step.

I am starting out at the beginning of the HTML tutorials and, although I have some very basic knowledge that I figured out along the way through trial and error, I have already had some "mysteries" explained just in the introduction - for example, the difference between a programming language and a mark up language (HTML is a mark up language).

This website has two other very neat features:

1. It provides a workspace in which you can experiment with the concepts you are learning (HTML, in my case) and see the results immediately in another section of the same screen. This means that you don't need your own server, website, website editor, etc. You don't even need your own computer to be able to fully benefit from these tutorials! All you need is access to the internet, such as from a public library or school computer lab.
2. The tutorials provide a few sample files that you can download to your computer, as a starter, if you want to create your own environment to test and experiment with your newfound knowledge.
   
   Between these two features and the very clear instructions, I think this will make learning HTML tremendously easier than I thought it would be. I intend to start with HTML and then move on to PHP, and then I'll see where I go from there. As an internet marketer, hoping to make money online fairly quickly, I am looking forward to being able to quickly and easily create my own websites. I don't want to have to be limited by the functionality (or lack thereof) of pre-made website templates, so learning web design is definitely one of my priorities right now (starting with almost zero knowledge and experience). I am excited to get started, right now! 
   

It Works!

Okay! The RSS feed works! I just checked over on my Yahoo! page and the link to my blog post is there.

Testing the RSS feed

Well, this is my first post to my new blog. I'm using this post to test whether the RSS feed that I set up on MY Yahoo! page works.