Twitter has become not only a great site for connecting with people around the world, it’s become a favorite tool of internet marketers because:

• They can offer tidbits of valuable information to a huge audience.
• They can connect with prospects and customers on a personal level
• They can glean market and industry information from tweets

The trick is to know if your tweets are having a direct effect on your profits. The trick, is to track your tweets. Fortunately, because developers know how important Twitter is to marketers, they’ve developed several tools to track tweets. Here are just a few ways to track your tweets:

#1 A standard calendar and an analytics program. The most basic way to track tweets is to record when and what you tweet on a calendar. You can of course use a print calendar however, you can also track them on a calendar like Outlook or Google. Once a week, compare your tweets to your analytics data to see which tweets generated traffic. This way you can determine to a reasonable degree, which tweets make the biggest impact and what days or times of the day are more effective. You can also link to unique web pages in your tweets to make sure you’re evaluating the right information.

#2 Twistory – Puts your twitter feed into a calendar so you can see your twitter history. It essentially automates what you’re doing in #1.

#3 TweetEffect tracks what tweets gain followers for you and what tweets essentially cost you followers.

#4 Tweetie is an iPhone application that lets you track your tweets. You can view and respond to the tweets you follow, post your own tweets, and search for tweets by keyword just like you would from your computer only better because you can do it on the go.

#5 Twitoaster is a service that monitors twitter conversations. It works by simply aggregating the conversations and publishing relevant statistics.

#6 Viralheat. Viralheat is a paid service with membership levels based on your needs. Starting at $9.99 a month,“Viralheat allows you to monitor, analyze and glean insights at blazing speeds.”

#7 Of course there are dozens of other twitter tracking services including sites like TweetLater and HootSuite that let you schedule posts and track mentions and followers.

Finding the service or software that’s right for you may take a little trial and error. Of course, if you’re looking to simply track your tweets and the positive effect they have on your business, the five mentioned above are a good place to start.

Online, one of the most significant keys to success is getting website traffic. The more visitors you have, the better your sales and profits. Presumably you have a niche and you know your keywords, and regularly conduct keyword research to stay on top of what’s popular. Based on those assumptions here are five quick and easy tips to get website traffic fast!

Tip #1 Make sure you’re actually tagging your keywords.

Do you spend a lot of time optimizing your content and then neglect to tag them on your webpage? Tags are where search engines look and if there are no tags they’ll pass right by your web pages. Here’s a quick brief on tags.

There are a number of tag types including,

• Title tags. Title tags are quite possibly the most important place to situate your keywords. Here’s what they look like -Primary keyword phrase here. Your title tag is where you place your primary keyword or keyword phrase. The sentence will describe your business in less than 90 characters.
• Header Tags. Header tags are next in order of importance to search engines. They’re ranked in order of importance and look like this – Primary and/or Secondary keywords here

The “1” designates this header as the most important header on the page.

• Meta Tags. Meta tags provide the small descriptive text found underneath the title tag on the search engine results page. Like title tags these should be kept brief, informative and up to date.
• Alt Tags. Alt tags are used to provide a text description of a graphic. Each graphic on your site should have a description and an alt tag.

Tip #2 Add content to your site daily

Content is essential for traffic and a top search engine ranking. Content is what search engine spiders look for and index – without it there’s nothing to index or rank. Give visitors and search engines a reason to visit and index your site. Make a commitment to provide daily, optimized content and your traffic will soar.

Tip #3 Procure valuable and relevant incoming links

The more websites which link to your webpages the more valuable search engines perceive you to be, though not all links are created equal. Search engines give more leverage to links from sites which are popular and credible and from sites which are relevant to your website topic.

There are different types of links.

- A direct link looks like a basic website address, for example, www.yourwebsite.com

- A text link occurs when the webpage address is embedded in the text. Readers simply click on the link and are redirected to a new website page.

- If the link is to an internal web page, for example an article published on a website, rather than the home page, it is called a “deep link.”

You can encourage linking to your website by:

• Adding content to your site.
• Submitting to article directories.
• Publishing press releases.
• Blogging and participating in social networking forums, chat rooms and social networking sites.

Tip #4 Be Social!

Now more than ever before, internet marketing is about building a community. Whether you offer a forum on your website or you participate in social networking sites, social networking is a valuable traffic generating tactic. Sites like Facebook and Twitter can be powerful tools for generating links and traffic to your site – create a profile and then post comments, links to your site and ideas which generate conversation.

Get involved – many chat rooms and forums are industry specific, find those which cater to your industry, and begin participating. Speak to and connect with a highly targeted audience.

Tip #5 Advertise for more exposure and traffic

Advertising, when handled strategically, can be used to promote your content and products or services. PPC advertising is often the tool of choice because you control the advertising budget on a daily basis and have the tools to test and track your advertising efforts. Once you’ve honed your PPC ads the return on investment can be phenomenal in terms of traffic and purchases.

For maximum results, create a traffic and SEO strategy. Outline your plan and your goals and then take the necessary action. Take advantage of these five traffic and search engine tips to boost your business.