1. If you want to gather traffic info on your competitors as well as look at other interesting statistics for your Web site, take a look at:  http://www.Alexa.com In the search box at the top of the page, enter your Web address (yoursite.com) and click on the "Web Search" button. Alexa will return results for your Web Site. Be sure to check the additional features in the left column, when you are viewing the results for your page.
   
   If you would like to compare your Web site traffic rank to other Web sites,
   go to: http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=1000&h=600&r=1m&u=eBay.com/&u=amazon.com just replace the eBay.com with your Web sites name and the amazon.com with your competitor's site name.  You can also ad up to 3 more sites on the same graph, by simply placing (/&u=) between each Web address, this will give you a total of 5 Web sites that you can compare to each other over a one month period. You can increase the time that the graph covers, by changing the "1m" (stands for 1 month) in the Web address to up to 24m (24 month or  2 years) of data. It is very interesting for showing long term trends.
    
2. To see how a Web site looked in the past, take a look at the Wayback Machine This is an interesting tool that has been archiving Web sites since 1996. To use this free tool, go to http://web.archive.org/ at the top of the page, enter the Web address and click on "Take Me Back" button.In the case of TIAS, it will look something like this: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.tias.com
    
3. The Google search engine is probably the single most important search engine to have your site listed in. To see how many pages you have listed in Google, try the following search. Go to http://www.google.com and in the search box enter: site:YourSiteName.com -adfg in the case of the TIAS.com Web site, the search would look something this site:tias.com -adfg  In the upper right corner of the page, Google will give you a count for the total number of pages they have listed for that Web address on their system. This number changes on an almost daily basis, so keep track of it. You may even want to graph it. If you see a tremendous drop, you may have a problem that needs further investigation.
    
4. Need more in-depth information on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and online marketing strategies? Take a look at these two sites: WebmasterWorld at http://www.webmasterworld.com and Search Engine Watch at http://www.searchenginewatch.com Take some time to browse these sites.
    
5. Here is a great service that offers free online press releases. If you have something newsworthy going on at your Web site, you might consider paying a few extra dollars to get your press release upgraded. For more information, take a look at: http://www.prweb.com/ I seem to get much more play, when I submit press releases over the weekend, which seems to be the opposite of the strategy that most PR services use.
    
6. Publishing an online newsletter can be a powerful marketing tool. Online newsletters are inexpensive to produce and the rewards can be substantial. Your newsletter should contain information that your customers can use. Encourage them to contribute to your newsletter. Keep it entertaining and avoid publishing a newsletter full of marketing hype,  this will only result in customers getting turned off to your message. As an example of a popular online newsletter, take a look at http://www.tias.com/newsletter

Best of luck to you with your online endeavors. If you have questions about running a business online, don't hesitate to drop me an email.

Kind Regards,
Phillip Davies
TIAS.com Inc.
1-888-653-7883
phil@tias.com