If you’ve read my About page, you probably know that I got more serious about making money online when the income I generated from HomeMusician.net actually got five times higher over a three months period. Part of this success came from using Axandra’s IBP & Arelis software which helped my website to rank higher in search engine results positioning.

IBP (or Internet Business Promoter) is actually two tools in one. This SEO software from Axandra contains IBP for website optimization and Arelis for link building. Amongst IBP’s features, it offers keyword analysis research, top 10 ranking optimization and mass search engine submission.

Arelis, on the other hand, helps you build quality links to your website by providing you with your potential partners’ PageRank, Alexa traffic and backlinks. It also helps you keep track of the sites you’ve sent email to, approved and rejected.

Get A Top 10 Ranking Easily

IBP analyzes your top competitors’ website and compares your web page to theirs so that you can optimize yours efficiently. It also allows you to analyze keyword density and inbound links quality.

Submit Your Website In No Time

IBP features an automatic and semi-automatic search engine submitter. Your website is submitted to hundreds of search engines and directories within a few clicks.

Track Your Search Engine Rankings Automatically

Tracking your website’s ranking has never been so easier. Simply setup a scheduled task and IBP will automatically send you a report of your website’s rankings for a list of given keywords and search terms.

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Knowing your visitors is crucial to your website, especially if you’re generating an income from the traffic you get, whether it’s through sales or advertisement. That’s why it’s important to have good statistics about your site. You want to know where your visitors came from, how they found your site, which pages they’ve read, how long they stayed, how often they come back, etc.

While there are plenty of tools available, I’ll focus mainly on AwStats today. AwStats is a free and powerful tool that generates advanced statistics for many protocols including web, streaming, ftp and mail transfer. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and generates statistics in HTML format.

Installing AwStats On Linux

1. Get your copy of AwStats from SourceForge.net at
   http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=13764
2. Extract all files from the archive and upload it to a temporary folder on your web server. This folder needs not to be accessible through HTTP.# tar xvzf awstats-[version].tar.gz
3. Move all the content from the archive to /usr/local/awstats. When you’re done, this directory should contain:
   • ./docs
   • ./README.TXT
   • ./tools
   • ./wwwroot
4. Change directory to /usr/local/awstats/tools and execute ./awstats_configure.pl# cd /usr/local/awstats/tools
   # ./awstats_configure.pl
   
5. Go through the configuration script.
6. Add a cron task to update statistics on a daily basis. To do this, simply create a new file named awstats_updateall.sh into /etc/cron.daily. This is the script’s content:#!/bin/sh
   /usr/local/awstats/tools/awstats_updateall.pl now
   
7. Add execute permission to awstats_updateall.sh
   
   # chmod 0755 /etc/cron.daily/awstats_updateall.sh
   
8. Create a directory named “awstats” into /var/lib.
9. Verify that the following directives have been added to your httpd.conf file. If not, you will have to add them manually:#
   Alias /awstatsclasses “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/classes/”
   Alias /awstatscss “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/css/”
   Alias /awstatsicons “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/icon/”
   ScriptAlias /awstats/ “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/cgi-bin/”
   #
   # This is to permit URL access to scripts/files in AWStats directory.
   #
   <Directory “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot”>
   Options None
   AllowOverride None
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all
   </Directory>
   
10. Edit your AwStats configuration to make sure all settings are correct. This file is located in /etc/awstats/awstats.[your domain name].conf
11. Make sure your httpd access log file format is “combined”. To verify this, open /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and look for:
    
    CustomLog [your log path]/access_log commonandchange it to:
    
    CustomLog [your log path]/access_log combined
    
12. Restart the httpd service:
    
    # service httpd restart
    
13. Generate some statistics:
    
    # /etc/cron.daily/awstats_updateall.sh
    
14. Try accessing AwStats through your web browser at http://[your domain name]/awstats/awstats.pl

That’s pretty much it!

You can read the AwStats documentation here : http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/index.html

Is your database-driven website indexed by every search engines? Are your URLs impossible to remember for your visitors because they look like this:

http://www.mydomain.com/
articles.php?category=39&article=27

This is a problem with large websites as they are database-driven and parameters have to be sent to a script for processing. Search engines are much better at indexing static pages. Even though Google doesn’t seem to be afraid of dynamic pages, other search engines such as Yahoo! and Live will probably index just a few pages as they don’t want to be caught in a loop.

Fortunately, there are at least three solutions to this: using PATH INFO, ForceType and mod_rewrite.

There’s another method which involves 404 pages but I wouldn’t recommend it since you won’t be able to submit your sitemap to Google. When you add your website to Google’s Webmaster Tools, 404 pages MUST return a 404 error code but when you use that method to write friendly URLs, you change that 404 code to 200 (which means the page exists even if it doesn’t).

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