There are definitely a lot of useful web stat software and tracking tools online. There are also some staples in the industry, like StatsCounter and others. But there are also some newer services and other, not so well known, website stat tools worth reviewing. I left Omniture and a few other larger companies off of the list because I felt they appealed mostly to companies with deeper pockets. The list below is instead suited to the "everyday" Webmaster.

GetClicky.com - Clicky is a web analysis tool that tracks a high level of detail for every visitor to your website. Some of their website stats show "actions per visit" for users, visitor hostnames, most active visitors, tagcloud stats data, and more. Personally, I would rate this tool a bit higher than Google Analytics, but that's probably because of the deep data it provides. We were very impressed with the free version of Clicky and plan to use this cool web tracking tool more in the coming months.

We just finished up a real quickie Drupal site conversion for FindNews.org, an older news domain I've owned for over 6 years. The site was running on DotNetNuke since late 2004 and needed to be converted over to something a little more intuitive for us to manage and more search engine friendly. Drupal was the obvious choice. So, we simply plugged in Drigg, the Digg-style Drupal module, to allow for the social voting functionality you'll notice on the site.

If anyone would like to benefit from this website and submit anything news worthy, please feel free to do so. You'll get some decent traffic if the news is worthy enough and you'll also receive a link back to your website. Previous to the site's conversion (several days ago) the daily visitors was ~8,000 to 12,000 per day and there are roughly 150 to 200 visitors on the site at any given time.

We still have some things left as far as cleaning up some of the design and functionality of this social news website, but for the most part the initial Phase 1 functionality is pretty solid. Let us know how you like it and feel free to leave any suggestions below or through the FindNews.org contact page. Thanks and enjoy!

Winner Update: Holger from Wakefiles.com won this contest. We had to spend some time testing to see if many of the social media site submitted were valid and actually provided a back link from a profile or similar page. One of my link builders confirmed this today, so congradulations Holger on making a quick $500! I'll repost the full list after they are all confirmed.

Contest Post: Let's make this into a contest. Whoever adds the most social media and/or online profile-type sites other than the ones already listed in this post wins $500 in cash.

Rules - Sites submitted must offer back links (anchor text with URL or URL link only). The contest ends May 15th at 5pm EST. You can come back as many times as you wish and add more sites in a different comment post (of course using the same username/email in your comments so we can tally up your total links submitted over the next two weeks). Good luck!

Building Links Through Social Profiles

One of the fastest ways to build backlinks and cast your net wider on the Internet is through social media profile building. However, not all profile sites are created equally in terms of SEO value. Some profiles don’t allow any links back to your site while others offer URL links and anchor text.

I’ve done some digging into a the profiles of a few top rated social sites to find which ones offered links in the public profile:

We are getting ready to port a new Drupal theme called "Publisher" over to Drupal 5.x and 6.x. This theme is extremely clean and elegant and I'm sure will be a huge success. You can find out more about our professional Drupal themes project by visiting ThemeSnap.com.

Snapshot of the Drupal Publisher Theme

What's cool about this latest Drupal theme we are working on is that it can be adapted to so many types of websites and for numerous indstries, i.e. a newspaper or magazine, music website, legal/law site, fashion, community, business/corporate, education, etc.

Features of the Drupal Publisher Theme

• Tabbed content header - (for rotating news or site information)
• Front page image thumbnail previews (sidebar and center content location)
• Video thumbnail integration
• Elegant top-nav dropdown menus
• Several front page custom views of content, i.e. title teasers
• Fast loading and validated CSS/XHTML Drupal theme

We are working on two additional themes after the release of the Publisher theme. Our goal is to be the leader in high-end, custom Drupal themes that use popular modules like CCK, Views, Imagecache, and others.

Tell us what you think (despite the small-ish, blurry thumb) ;-)

With all of the great places to publish content online today, it very likely that you can secure multiple spots in the search engine rankings with your content. One place I’ve found that seems to be beneficial in terms of ranking in search engines is Slideshare.net.

Slideshare is a social media content site that allows you to upload, favorite, bookmark, tag, and comment on slide shows. Additionally, you can join groups, download slideshows, and are provided with code to embed or link to slideshows on your blog or website. Like any social media site, being an active networker on Slideshare by commenting, favoriting, joining groups, and linking to slideshows can boost your slideshow’s visibility and backlinks.

I stumbled upon the SEO benefits of Slideshare by accident after publishing a slideshow not for rankings, but for purely utilitarian purposes. Soon, I realized that the slideshow was ranking on page 1 of Google for a term with 1.5 million results. And that was without being active at all in the Slideshare community.

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If you use the Drupal Sitemap module (also called XML Sitemap), you've probably noticed that a site upgrade will convert your search engine friendly URL aliases back to the default Drupal node URLs, i.e. /node/123, etc. This XML Sitemap problem causes URL duplication in search engines since the pathauto URLs would now be replaced by the node version.

If you are unsure or using an earlier 5.x versions, I would suggest to check your XML sitemap page to see if you have the same issue. If you find that this has happened to you, here are a few things to help correct the issue (found via Drupal). Note: I would always suggest testing on a staging site versus a live site.