Our site of the day is Andy Beard‘s Niche Marketing. I had the honor of speaking on the phone recently with Andy, and he is one of those people I’m delighted to say is every bit as helpful one on one as he is online, if not more so.

The sometimes controversial, and always helpful Mr. Beard has written a great deal of material on how to get better traffic out of what you’ve got and how to raise your number of visitors through search, blogging, increasing subscribers, and other means.

Here’s just a small sample of his greatest blog posts in that area:

• Converting Visitors Into Subscribers
• How To Optimize Your Blog For Syndication | Meme Trackers
• Choosing The Right Social Bookmarking Sites
• Ultimate Tag Warrior SEO Tricks(part one of a series)
• Do People Use Feed Counters to Show Off? Top 10 Ways to A Massive Subscriber List
• How a Blogroll can kill your Pagerank
• Google Blog Search | How Google Blogsearch ranks your Posts… In their own words! (or not)

Click the titles to visit these pages on his site. Don’t forget to subscribe to his site via email or RSS – you’ll kick yourself for missing his fresh, innovative ideas.

…. the coolest Google PR tool that SEW found, from Webmaster Eyes.

What it Does: It overlays the Google PR of any page linked from that site with the site’s PR.
Why it’s Cool: You can study it to learn more about how the PR is distributed on the site – after all it’s the individual pages that matter, not necessarily the site. You can also click on the PR button to navigate the site.
More About Google PR: MasterNewMedia.org has a mega-page on this.

Now, in case you’re new here, PR refers to Google Page Rank, and technically, just knowing it, or even having it, won’t increase your traffic by itself. But the clout itself IS often a traffic magnet when you get to 5 and higher. If high traffic is what you want though, you’re better off balancing relevant,fresh content with traffic-producing links pointing to you.

If the whole thing about Google Page Rank confuses you, the simplest way to explain it in laymans terms is that some links to your site count more than others, and that this is because Google considers some sites more “important” than others. Quantity counts, but Quality matters too.

You can read more about Google Page Rank from Google’s official explanation at their site.

Use the Google Inbound Link (IBL) Check at http://www.iblcheck.com to find out how many in-bound links you would need to get ranked for certain keywords.

Before you go, keep this in mind: the higher the PR of the incoming links, the less you’ll need to rank. When this site first started showing up in ranks, I had only 27 in-bound links. This was after the Florida update last year, but before the backlinks update in June.

So many of us are obsessed with our page’s Google Page Rank, and how to get it higher. While it’s not as important as it once was, it’s still a good thing to have, particularly as we get into our discussion of Google’s latest news in the next tip.

There’s a site where you can find out your Google Page Rank that you might not have heard of called Prog.

Surf to it here: http://www.webmasterbrain.com/prog/.

You can use it to see which pages of your site have the higher page rank or do research on which sites to try and link to that might not be as highly ranked for their keywords as you in Google, but have higher PR than you, making a reciprocal link a good exchange.

Tip: Think parallel markets, not competitors.