Know Your Alexa Rank

Alexa.com offers a search engine, a directory and a toolbar (among other services). It also has a resource called Alexa Traffic Rankings (click the traffic rankings tab at the top when you get to Alexa.com), which is what we are focusing on when we study AlexaRank. You can input any domain name into the traffic rankings form and Alexa will spit out the current ranking data for that site.

The AlexaRank blue bar is a snapshot representation of the full Alexa traffic rankings, which include graphs that track the history of practically every website online, or at least every site Alexa “touches” or is exposed to via it’s toolbar. Each site has ranking number, the lower the number the better, which is an aggregate of the last three months of traffic data.

What Is Alexa?

Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com and is a website which provides information on traffic levels for websites. The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

Put simply, the Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases its ranking schema on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who visit a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

Alexa ranking is heavily skewed towards websites which have a large webmaster/tech audience. This is because webmasters or web savvy audiences are much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed than websites whose visitors are unaware of Alexa.

As such, many have indicated that Alexa is a vastly inaccurate method of measuring a website’s reach, traffic and potential. I don’t disagree.

Alexa is a silly way to measure web traffic but unfortunately, in an imperfect world Alexa is still heavily used by webmasters and ad networks when measuring the value of advertising on your website.

About Alexa Rank

To increase your Alexa rank in the long run, I would highly recommended that one focus on developing quality content which attracts and maintains a large audience instead of purely focusing on artificially increasing your Alexa Rank.

Great link-worthy content will leads to an natural increase in site traffic and is an excellent way to passively increase your Alexa rank.

It is important to emphasize that you should devote most of your efforts in growing your site audience alongside integrated implementation of any of the following tips below.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.

2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day. According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.

3. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers. Be sure to link to Alexa’s full explanation of their toolbar and tracking system so your readers know what installing the toolbar or extension entails.

Blogwalking = Back Links

Everybody has their own blogwalking ritual. For me, my first priority is to visit everyone who has visited me. Hey, it’s only fair. If they made the effort to come all the way to your blog, it’s the simplest way to show your appreciation. So I will clear my shoutmix and my chat box. Some people wonder why I have both. The simple reason is because I know some people prefer one over the other when BW (I prefer shoutmix especially with all those cute little animated icons). Secondly, when one goes wrong, visitors can always type in the other one.

Secondly, I will visit all those links I have on my sidebar. I put them there for a reason right? It’s because I really do like reading their entries. So I make a point of visiting them whenever they update their blogs.

Increase PR by Blogwalking

Blogwalking is an activity of blogger to surf from one blog to the other blog, read its content, give comment, ask for link exchange or just leave comment in shout box. Blogwalking is very useful to promote our blog, increase Alexa rank and the most important is to make friendship among bloggers.

Some people blogwalking just leave message in shoutbox in hoping the owner visit back to their blog, maybe like me, this is the easiest way instead giving comment on post because we should read the article first, but when we read any article we get something useful and add our knowledge.

There are some service that offer us free chat box or shout box such as Cbox, Shoutmix, Meebome, Oggix, Sbox, and others. The most famous shoutbox or chat box I know is Shoutmix. During blogwalking I found many shoutmix chat widget than other services. As I know that shoutmix is very simple, easy but very interesting. We can customize our chat widget so looks different than others.

Blogwalking Tips

Blogwalking is one of blogging process that a blogger should consistency do. You may blogwalking to another blogs randomly but it's better to blogwalk through blog that has the same niche with you. Sometime finding blog that suite with your niche is hard and time consumption.

There is some way to find blog to blogwalk that has the same niche with yours:

1. Search on Google Blog Search

You can search it by type your blog keywors on Google Blog Search. Click the blog's links that appear at the first page one by one. Open it in new tabs, so you blogwalking from one tab to another without leaving the tab that has google blog search result. After the blogs open you can start fast reading throughout the blog post and leave a comment on the comment section. Or if the blog has chat box you can drop a few word just to say hello. Then you can move to another blogs and doing the same thing as I mention above.
There is no rule that restricted the number of blog that you want to visit for blogwalking. It defends on your goal to build a relationship with another blogs. You can visit 10 per day or you can visit to 200 blogs per day if you have the time.

2. Browse it through Blog Directory

Blog directory such as Technorati, My Bloglog, Blog Catalog, have wide range of category. Browse blogs that have the same category as yours, find some posts that interest you and then do the above tricks that I mention earlier.

PR 4 Does Matter

White Hat Methods
# Educate your readers about coComment and encourage them to use it and make to make comments on your blog
# You can to reciprocal deals with other bloggers and online contacts. For example you could agree to comment on each others blog posts while tracking the comments with coComment. This not only gets free links from coComment, but also increases comment numbers too! (I suppose this is slightly ‘grey hat’).
# Offer an incentive to your readers to use coComment

Black Hat Method

You could simply create multiple coComment accounts and then go around commenting on your own blog, getting a link back for every spam comment you publish there.

This could become a problem for Technoratiwho should stop including links from coComment in their rankings because they are so easily gamed.

You could try and make me feel guilty for writing a Black hat method, but I’m half proud of myself for thinking of the White hat methods before the Black hat ones.

How To Get PR 4

Google PageRank is one of numerous factors Google uses to determine the importance of a blog and it is based on the value of your inbound links. Google evaluates how many links there are to your blog from other pages, and the relevance and quality of the linking sites. DigPageRank can help you check your own PageRank.

I believe that the following factors have contributed towards Google assign a blog with a PR4:

Guest posting

* I wrote two guest posts at Problogger. Each of these has given my blog a high-quality, relevant inbound link as ProBlogger is PR7 blog.

highly recommend writing guest articles for relevant blogs that are ranked with higher Google PageRank. Read more about how I got guest article spots on ProBlogger.net.

PR 4 Tips

You already know that leaving comments at blog posts will get you free links. But page rank of the posts is usually much lower then PR of main page of the blog so the "strength" of that link is weak. However there are sometimes exceptions, and the inner page of the blog is actually more linked to then the blog itself. This happens with truly amazing blog posts but also there is a little secret I am going to tell you.

Blog theme authors like to leave a link to their theme post page in the theme footer and this makes theme posts very high PR. It is not unusual that blog theme posts have PR up to 6 or even 7 for very popular themes. So leaving a comment on the theme post will usually result in a very strong backlink. As always, be polite, use constructive commenting, leave a feedback on the theme or a suggestion for the author. Remember, you always need to give something in order to receive something.

Wordpress being the most popular platform is best source for finding high PR theme posts. You can browse through hundreds of wordpress themes on wordpress site and comment appropriately.

Some of you might be concerned that comment links are "nofollow". Nofollow is a special html tag that should instruct the search engine that the link has no relevancy and it should be ignored. It is usually used on blog comments and links to other irrelevant material. There are experiments that confirm that Google actually ignores nofollow tag so it does not matter if the comments have nofollow or not. But people are skeptics so here is a tip for those of you too.

Know More About SEO

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

Search Engine Optimization Tricks

11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

Search Engine Optimization Tips

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.