5 Rules of (SMO) Social Media Optimization

For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site’s performance on organic search listings.  While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO).  The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.  Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client’s website:

1. Increase your linkability – This is the first and most important priority for websites.  Many sites are “static” – meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront.  To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content.  Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy – Adding content features like quick buttons to “add to del.icio.us” are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).
3. Reward inbound links – Often used as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings.  To encourage more of them, we need to make it easy and provide clear rewards.  From using Permalinks to recreating Similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you
4. Help your content travel - Unlike much of SEO, SMO is not just about making changes to a site.  When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.
5. Encourage the mashup – In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason).  YouTube’s idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth.  Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mashups that can drive traffic or augment your content.

9 Easy Tips For Online Success

Online marketing is an interesting prospect to generate income from the internet. To make money from the internet, you can either create your own product or an easier way is to sell product created by someone else or a merchant. In simple terms, you become their affiliate. This article will provide 9 easy tips on affiliate marketing for beginners to generate their first online sale.

1) Be patient. Everyone wants to make money fast. They want to be able to run before they can walk. Patient is a virtue even on the web. It is better to learn something thoroughly the first time then to rush into things quickly and have to correct your mistakes later.

2) Put in the work. Action is the key to success in online marketing. Plough the field and put what you’ve learn into practice.

3) Promote one affiliate program at a time. Put your focus and energy on one affiliate product or program at a time. Do not promote too many product simultaneously. You can try to do it but your results will be mediocre.

4) Go for the long haul. Look at affiliate marketing as a business and not a hobby. Think long term.

5) Keep things simple. Some of the most effective internet marketing strategies are the simplest. Strategy such as blogging and article marketing are simple systems and yet they generate good results.

6) Learn the basics. Commit to getting good at internet marketing basics such as article marketing, traffic generation, sales copy writing, testing and tracking promotional campaign etc.

7) Use leverage. Think of ways how you can do more with less. If you have money for your affiliate business, think of how you can leverage it to generate more valuable time for you.

Have a business plan on the first day. Write down what you want to achieve from your affiliate marketing business from day one. Put it down on paper your goals and the necessary steps needed to reach them.

9) Set a dateline for everything you do. This will help you get rid of procrastination. By setting a time frame, you will know how long it will take you to achieve your goals.

Affiliate marketing for beginner may seems a daunting task. However, every successful internet marketers started off as a newbie. The 9 tips above will help you to get started on making your first sale from your online business.

Tips for Better Pay Per Click PPC Ads

When it comes to pay-per-click advertising, there are two ways to decrease your spending. You can lower your cost per click (which will lower your position and your CTR) or you can improve your ads (which will increase your CTR and your position). Great ads will attract more clicks for a given amount of impressions, which will be rewarded by Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing with lower bid prices or higher rankings.

The real secret to writing “the best ad on the page” is to ruthlessly test and track multiple ads over multiple test iterations. By doing this, you will improve your ad over time, and will eventually have a great performing ad with a very high click through rate.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few tips you could use to give your initial ads a boost, or to help you beat your personal best performing ad time and time again. So without further ado, here are 18 tips for writing better PPC ads:

1. Write ads for small groups of keywords. By grouping your keywords very tightly, and writing your ads specifically for those keywords, you will give yourself a large advantage over your competition. Many people are too lazy to take the time required to do this properly, yet it is something that will increase your CTR every single time.
2. Work your keywords into the ads as much as possible. If you took the advice from the previous tip, you will have an easier time with this one. You should try to get your keywords to appear multiple times in your ad so that you can take full advantage of keyword bolding. I sometimes include the keyword in all four lines of the PPC ad for maximum bolding.
3. Give the ads some visual appeal. This takes some additional creativity and planning, but can really help your ad to stand out. You can make each line progressively longer (or shorter) for a cascading effect, you can alternate lengths to create a visual “arrow” or “reverse arrow” shape within your ad, or you can make your ad intentionally extra short. All of these will help you ad differentiate itself from the competition and will hopefully attract some eyeballs.
4. Write ads with your audience in mind. When you are writing an ad, think to yourself “what is my audience looking for when they search for this keyword?” If you can “read their minds” and guess their internal dialog, you will be able to answer their exact questions and get their attention. This is another tip that is immensely easier if you group your keywords very tightly.
5. Create an attention-grabbing headline. Nothing in your ad is more important that your headline. The problem with PPC ads is that you don’t get much space for it (25 characters with AdWords). Craft your headline wisely, but don’t stress over it too much, you will probably be split testing many, many different variations before you find the great ones.
6. Ask the audience a question. This is definitely a good strategy for certain markets. If you can work a question into your headline or description, test it out and see how it impacts the CTR. If someone is searching for something, and then you confirm what they are searching for, they are likely to click on your ad. Additionally, the tone of the question, along with the question mark, helps differentiate your ad from the others.
7. Use specific numbers. This is a common copywriting trick that has been used for decades. Numbers create interest and specific numbers create curiosity. They won’t always perform better, but try to test the impact of including numbers in your ad. If you can, include a very specific number such as “314″ instead of “300+” or “76.83%” instead of “75%”. You don’t have to be 100% accurate with the numbers either, as long as you aren’t blatantly lying.
8. Capitalize strategically. It is better to capitalize the first letter of every word? The first letter of important words? Just the first letter of words in the headline? Should you capitalize words in your display URL? You can never be sure until you have tested it, but it is something that you must test. I usually start out capitalizing everything, then try out any combinations I can think of.
9. Borrow ideas from others. Another copywriting principle that has been in practice for decades is borrowing ideas from other ads. Although you should technically only take “ideas” (such as rewriting an ad about “pens” to work with your “cheese” keywords), you won’t get into any trouble copying direct competitors. Take some of the top (or your favorite) ads that are being shown for your keywords and mix them up to create something new. It they are at the top of the listings, they probably have a pretty good ad (or are paying out the nose).
10. Emphasize the benefits of your offer. Yet another age-old copywriting principle. Your audience doesn’t care how many features your are offering or how great they are, they want to know “What’s in it for me?” If you can tell them, in your ad, what benefit they will get from giving you their click, you will likely have a successful ad.
11. Use words that evoke emotion. If you can effectively get people to feel emotions when reading your ad, they will probably feel compelled to click it. The list of emotion words goes on and on, so here is a nice guide to emotion words.
12. Test multiple versions of your display URL. This was touched on in tip number 8, but needs to be expanded. While you should experiment with capitalization (i.e. “DomainName.com” vs “domainname.com”), you should also experiment with “www”, sub domains, and pages. It usually, but not always, increases the CTR when you include the keywords in your URL. You can essentially do this one of two ways: “Key-Words.DomainName.com” or “DomainName.com/Key-Words.” Although some uptight editors might disable these ads if the pages don’t actually exist, you can resubmit them and a nicer editor will realize that there is no harm done.
13. Be cautious with prices. Although prices do have their place as negative qualifiers, they will usually be detrimental to your CTR. Unless your price is the lowest, it is probably best to leave it out of your ad. You can, instead, state the savings as a benefit to the user.
14. Include a call-to-action. Sometimes, the most effective way to get someone to do something is to simply ask them to do it. That’s the principle behind the call to action. Because you have such limited space in a PPC ad, the call-to-action might not be beneficial, but is is at least worth a test. Just including something like “Click here to receive this benefit” is sufficient.
15. Double check spelling and grammar. This might seem obvious, but is can very easy to make a stupid mistake. Having a grammatical or spelling error in your ad hurts the credibility of your ad and will most likely get it disable by an editor, costing you valuable testing time.
16. Don’t waste space with useless words. Like I said before, the space available to you in a pay-per-click ad is extremely limited. Although your ads should be grammatically correct, they do not need to be sophisticated sentences. Keep them simply and concise so that it is easier for the reader to quickly understand what you are offering.
17. Use negative keywords. This isn’t directly related to actually writing your ads, but it is definitely important. It goes along with tip number 1. If you don’t use negative keywords, your ad is going to be triggered by keywords that you didn’t intend for. When this happens, your ad will not match what the consumer was searching for, they will not click your ad, and your CTR will suffer.
18. Make the ad relevant to the landing page. I saved this suggestion for last because it will not effect the CTR of your ad in the least bit (it can, however, effect your landing page quality score). With that being said, it is still very important that you make your ad relevant to the landing page. If a visitor reads a particular offer or benefit in your ad, they are expecting to find it when they click through. Give them what you promised in your ad and you will experience higher conversions. Give them something that doesn’t match the ad and you will have a lot of confused visitors who reach for the back button.

There you have it, eighteen tips I have learned through my experience with PPC marketing. Keep in mind that these are merely suggestions, they can’t possibly be used all at once, and they won’t always make for a better ad. You need to test every change you make to your ads to determine if it has a positive or negative overall effect.

PPC Tricks and Tips

PPC can be a minefield, creating as many problems as it solves – especially if money is an issue. PPC can get very expensive very quickly.

Here are some tricks and tips:

Don’t use any words that could be considered trademarked, such as “McDonald’s” or “ToysRUs.” In many cases, these phrases will result in your account being suspended. Even worse, you could find yourself in a bit of legal hot water – companies like these take their trademarks very seriously, and do not take kindly to people who use them for their own purposes. If for some reason you need to use a trademarked word or phrase, do yourself a favor and get permission before you use it.

Be wary of the promises you make. People are motivated by promises of free stuff beyond, but oftentimes that motivation only goes so far. If you offer something for free, chances are you’ll get lots of click-throughs, but most will only be people in search of something for nothing, which doesn’t do your business any good. In fact, it will cost you money because you have to pay for the fact that they clicked on your ad. If you don’t make such promises up front, you may get fewer click-throughs, but the people who do click on your ad will more likely be serious buyers.

As mentioned above, it’s imperative that you create destination pages. But that job doesn’t stop once the page is created. Periodically check your conversion rates for each page, and if you find that one is suffering much worse than another, change it up. Just as it is important to change the order of your words in your ad campaign, changing your destination pages will help you optimize your conversion rate.

PPC, then, can be an inexpensive easy way to drive traffic to your site, but it can easily get out of hand. Make sure you crunch the numbers are bid according to how much you can actually afford while still potentially making a profit. It won’t do you any good to big so high that your site is ranked first if you can’t afford to sell your product at a rate that will still garner you a profit. Stay on top of things!

Tips For Cost Effective Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising is one of the fastest ways to targeting prospective customers to your business products or services. A website can contract with one of the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN and bid on keywords. When a person using the search engine enters one of the keywords in the search box, their ad pops up on the search results page as a sponsored ad. Here are some tips to make sure your ad is seen above your competition.

Know Your Niche
Knowing your niche when it comes to pay per click advertising involves knowing what search terms surfers are most likely to type into an internet search engine when looking for a site such as yours. Coming up with as many phrases that describe your website or your product or service is your most handy tool. With this basic list of keywords that describe your niche market you can then proceed to use the internet to help you find more words or phrases that you might not have thought of to add to your list. You can also find derivatives of the main words you thought up to give you a broader scope of keywords to bid on. To find free tools to use online to assist you simply type in “keyword too” into any search engine.

Pick Low Competition Keywords
The world of pay per click advertising is very competitive and the words you might want to bid on can be out of your budget. The key is to find the low competition variations of your main keyword that are less popular and therefore will cost less. The best tool one can have when looking for low competition keywords in their niche is a keyword analyzer software which can be purchased or found for free online. Some keywords tools are very good for doing pay per click research because they not only give you a list of alternatives for any search word you enter, they will also display the number of searches for that keyword and the number of campaigns already running for the keyword phrase you entered. This gives you a good view of what words you can bid on without going over budget, and also allows you to find keywords to bid on that are uncharted, meaning they get a good number of monthly searches but there are no campaigns running for that keyword. Without a keyword analyzer tool you can also find out how many campaigns are running for any keyword by simply typing the word into in the search engine and counting the ads.

Write Engaging Ads
Pay per click ads are typically less than 125 characters. You don’t get lots of ad space to sell, so the object is to get into your customers head and ask yourself how they will benefit from your product or service. Listing a benefit in the form a question is a good way to engage those who view your ads. Some search engines such as Google allow you to score points through relevancy to search terms. Meaning the more relevant your ad is, based on how many times it is view verses how many it is clicked, the higher your ad will be on the list of ads bidding for that keyword. Using your main keyword in the title of the ad and in the ad itself will show your ad as having the exact phase that surfer searched for and thus increases the likeliness that they will click through to your web page.

Test Your Ads
Once you’ve written an add and included the keywords you’d like to bid on, your next step is to write a different ad and run it along side your first ad to test which one gets more click through’s or sales. Once you’ve found this out, write another one and try and beat your previous stats. This will eventually lead to you having the best ads possible. Most pay per click companies will allow you to run two ads simultaneously, sharing the account funds to each and displaying each ad the same number of times.

Once you have a few pay per click campaigns under your belt this system for choosing the right keywords and creating relevant ads will become routine. Done the right way pay per click advertising can be a very cost effective way to promote any online venture you are involved in.

How to Increase Alexa Ranking of Your Website

Alexa toolbar also useful to Browse expired websites database. Many times when we visit any website we got error message that website is not available. We have to simply click The Wayback Machine button on Alexa toolbar and we can see the old data of that website.

How to Increase Alexa Ranking of your website?

Alexa Toolbar using millions of users. Alexa Gives Ranking by Analysing the web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar Users. Alexa Sorting Millions of websites thru Alexa Toolbar and giving numerical rank for each website browsed by Alexa Toolbar.

First Step of increasing your websites Alexa Rank is Download Alexa Toolbar and start browsing your website regularly.

When you completed downloading of Alexa Toolbar, then you can see your websites Alexa Rank on Alexa Toolbar. May be if you dont have Alexa Rank it will Display “No Data” rank. Dont worry after couple of days your website will get Alexa Rank in number.

Keep browsing thru Alexa Toolbar within couple of months period your website will get good Alexa Ranking. Suggest & encourage your friends, relatives, your Company employees to download Alexa Toolbar in their computers. You will see the miracle your compnay websites will get very nice alexa rank.

You can download Alexa Toolbar here also. please click following link to download alexa Toolbar. forward this link to your friends, employees and many others also.

Download Alexa Toolbar

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.
In this article, I’ll examine the importance of the Alexa Rank as it relates to site monetization while briefly discussing some of the weaknesses involved in using Alexa ranking as a reliable traffic measure for any website.

Lastly, I’ve also included an extensive list of twenty methods and strategies you can use to increase your Alexa Rank dramatically in the short and long run.
What is the Alexa Rank?

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.
See Alexa’s definition of the Alexa Traffic Rank:

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.

The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users)

Why would you want to increase your Alexa rank?

Webmasters, advertisers and ad networks use your blog’s Alexa rank as a gauge to determine the worth of a link on your website. If you depend on link or site selling as a form of monetization you’ll definitely want to increase your Alexa rank, because it’ll increase your bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing.

Problems with the Alexa Rank

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.

I understand the defects of Alexa’s ranking system and I’m not going to go into more detail about it here. What’s primarily important to me is that the Alexa Rank has become a central element in site monetization strategies.

I’m not concerned with the utility and value of Alexa but it’s perceived importance in the eyes of potential advertisers.

Updates in seo’s Alexa Rank

Since moving to my own domain (from Blogspot) in the middle of January 2007, Dosh Dosh has moved from a rank of around 3 million to the current Alexa rank of 21, 709 within two months.
The growth has been consistent and I think most of it was due to the fact that the content on Dosh Dosh is orientated towards webmasters. Another plausible reason is because overall daily traffic for Dosh Dosh has been growing steadily day by day.
The increase in Alexa Rank was also partially due to the fact that I’m active in several webmaster forums, notably Digital Point which sends me some visitors every day. Getting stumbled and receiving thousands of visitors in a day has also undoubtedly helped to increase Dosh Dosh’s Alexa Rank.

How do I get started with Alexa?

There are two easy ways to start using Alexa. If you are using Internet Explorer, visit this page and download the Alexa Toolbar. If you’re using Firefox, download the SearchStatus extension which displays the Alexa Rank, Google PageRank as well as other useful features.

I highly recommend that you use Firefox and SearchStatus instead of Alexa toolbar, which I find to be more bulky and less useful.

Can one actually game or manipulate the Alexa Ranking?
I believe that there are methods which will allow you to easily bring an Alexa ranking in the millions down to the 100,000 level. However, bringing it past the 10,000 or 1,000 mark is a considerably more difficult process, because of the stiff competition among websites.

Some have adamantly stated that there are no proven ways to game Alexa, while others have claimed that auto-surfs and scripts do work to some degree.

I’m not going to take any sides because I can’t guarantee that auto-surfs or other artificial methods will have similar effects for every blog.

The easiest way to know to know if any of the tips mentioned below really work is to actually try them for yourselves and monitor the results.

20 Ways to Increase your Alexa Rank

Here is a collection of methods you can use to boost your Alexa Rank. Most of these tips are derived from several fellow webmasters I know who claimed to have derived positive results through their experiments with the Alexa Rankings.

Some of the other tips were derived articles and sources, which I have duly referenced at the end of this post.

Do these tips work? According to some, yes they definitely do work. But do note that most of them require active effort of some sort and hence, they will work as long as long as you are consistently performing specific actions.

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.
4. Work in an Office or own a company? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers. Perhaps it will be useful to note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPs are used.
5. Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.
6. Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.
7. Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters usually have the toolbar installed. You’ll get webmasters to visit your website and offer useful feedback. It’s also a good way to give back to the community if you have useful articles to share with others.
8. Write content that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.
9. Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?promotingwebs.wordpress.com . Replace promotingwebs.wordpress.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help. There is no official proof that redirects positively benefit your Alexa Rank, so use with caution.
10. Post in Asian social networking websites or forums. Some webmasters have suggested that East Asian web users are big Alexa toolbar fans, judging by the presence of several Asia-based websites in the Alexa Top 500. I suggest trying this only if you have the time or capacity to do so.
11. Create a webmaster tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often revisit your website to gain access to the tools. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very good example.
12. Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop link worthy material.
13. Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic. Doubly useful when your ad is highly relevant to webmasters.
14. Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while helping you rank in the search engines.
15. Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget/graph at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.
16. Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster forums and websites. A prominent and well displayed ad will drive lots of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your rank.
17. Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or promote specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis. You can easily find posters for hire in Digital Point and other webmaster forums.
18. Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers. This might be difficult to arrange and isn’t really a viable solution for most. I’m keeping this one in because some have suggested that it does work.
19. Use MySpace . This is a little shady so I don’t recommended it unless you’re really interested in artificially inflating your Alexa Rank. Use visually attractive pictures or banners and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. This will be most effective if your website has content that is actually relevant to the MySpace Crowd.
20. Try Alexa auto-surfs. Do they work? Maybe for brand new sites. I think they are mostly suitable for new websites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so I suggest using with caution.

Resources on Alexa Rank

Several of the tips listed above were taken from Aaron Wall’s article on Alexa Ranking. This post by Aaron will also give you some insight on Alexa’s webmaster bias.

A lower Alexa number means a greater level of traffic, and the traffic drops off logarithmically. You can fake a good Alexa score using various techniques, but if it shows your rankings in the millions then your site likely has next to no traffic.

Alexa by itself does not mean that much, but it simply provides a rough snapshot of what is going on. It can be spammed, but if a site has a ranking in the millions then it likely has little traffic.

Peter Norvig writes about Alexa Toolbar and the Problem of Experiment Design. He examines some problems with Alexa as a traffic measuring tool:

But one bias they don’t really comment on is the selection bias: the data would be good if it truly represented a random sample of internet users, but in fact it only represents those who have installed the Alexa toolbar, and that sample is not random.

The samplees must be sophisticated enough to know how to install the toolbar, and they must have some reason to want it. It turns out that the toolbar tells you things about web sites, so it is useful to people in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry, so it overrepresents those people.

One possible source of skewing in Alexa data is a bias toward webmaster-y sites. Alexa shows how popular web sites are, so it’s natural that webmasters install the Alexa toolbar.

Some do it just so that their normal day-to-day visits around the web (including their own site) are added to Alexa’s stats. The net effect is that webmaster-related sites are going to look more important to Alexa

Marketing Scoop has some tips on improving the Alexa Rank. (Thanks Beth!)

A very long thread on Digital Point which sees webmasters having a discussion on how Alexa Ranks can be gamed or manipulated through scripts and auto-surfs. Worth a read.

There you have it… twenty ways to boost your Alexa Rank and increase your site’s monetization potential.
What do you think of Alexa? Have you tried increasing your Alexa Rank by any of these methods?

SEO Strategies – How To Achieve Higher Search Engine Positioning

The main objective of any online business Web site is to promote a product or service. The purpose of an e-commerce Web site, is to allow your site’s visitors to buy your products or services directly from your Web site.

With the stiff competition among hundreds, or even thousands of online businesses these days, a Web site that can easily be located, and offers user-friendly interfaces and layouts, will definitely be more competitive than those who cannot easily be seen, or would not look attractive and enticing enough to Web customers.

Fully optimized Web sites allow the generation of more visitors and revenues, and does not require you visitors to call you during business hours, and will only rely on the impulse of the buyer or viewer. buyer. However, the major drawback among online business Web sites is that a very few of them can be properly indexed by search engine spiders, and generally will fail to rank properly.

Stuffing Keywords Won’t Do The Trick

A search engine spider places valued importance on what it reads highest on the page, therefore your site need to have appropriate keywords that include your targeted phrases. The practice f stuffing in keywords in the hopes that it will add weight to your page generally won’t work.

The phase “keyword density” refers to the amount of content that is made up of your targeted keywords, and according to search engine optimization (SEO) exerts, the estimates for the right percentage of keywords may range anywhere from 4 or 5%, to 10 to 12%. Basically, when it comes to keyword density, experts note that you should put your keywords in the content as much as you can, while keeping it perfectly readable and not confusing to your readers.

What Internal Linking Means For You Site

In order to make sure that your Web site gets properly indexed, you need to ensure that the search engine spiders have an easy path through your site. Using text links would make for reasonable options, as the anchor text, or the actual words that area used to link to a specific page, )make things relevant to that page for the words used to link to it.

According to SEO veterans, there are two ways in ensuring that your Web site gets well crawled by the search engine spiders, and that the relevancy is added, is to first is to install text links on the bottom of your homepage, to your main internal pages. The second method, is to create a sitemap to all your internal pages and link to it from your homepage. These two methods both offer many advantages and some disadvantages as well.

Appropriate Link Building Techniques

It’s a fact that almost all of the major search engines give good credit to Web sites that have good-quality links pointing back to them. Just how many links would be enough actually depends on your industry and targeted phrases. The first place to find good is to go to general and topic-specific directories.

After this, you may also wish to move into reciprocal link building, and this refers to the exchange of links between two related Web sites. There are some Webmasters who simply link to any website that links back to them. You need to find Web sites that you think your site’s visitors will find interesting, and you’ve probably found a good link partner, as you will prefer to get links from Web sites that are related to yours.