Do you know what Alexa rank and Google PR (page rank) your website has? How about your competitors? And what is an Alexa rank anyway?
An Alexa rank is a calculated measure of unique visitors and pageviews on a given web site. This may be counter intuitive but the lower your Alexa rank the better. Currently google.com has an Alexa rank of 1,and Facebook 4. Now you will find all sorts of debate online on how accurate the rank is, but everyone agrees it is useful as a rough measure of a website’s traffic. If you haven’t already you should compare your Alexa rank to your competitor’s website. Is yours higher? Then you have some work to do.
Google page rank, which ranges from 1 – 10, 10 being the highest measure, indicates how important and relevant Google thinks your site is. yahoo.com is a PR 9. cnn.com has a PR 10.
There are a number of ways to find out Alexa and Google page ranks. For Alexa, you can go directly to alexa.com and look a particular site up. There are also a number of plugins you can install directly into your Firefox browser (if you needed a reason to switch from using Internet Explorer, these tools might just convince you). If you like simple and unobtrusive check out searchstatus. For a more full featured tool you’ll want to download the SEO toolbar from seobook.com.
Check out searchstatus’s icon for options next to the PageRank and Alexa measures. It will, among other things, give you a list of meta tags for a site. SeoBook’s tool bar installs underneath your toolbar bookmarks and presents backlink information at a glance.
Remember voting for the prom queen? The candidates campaigned for your vote and if she got the most votes, she wore the crown at the dance. The google SERPs (search engine results, the listings that appear when you search on a particular keyword phrase) work in the same way. Google organizes it’s search listings on a number of factors, but one very important one is based on the number of “votes” for your site. But what are these votes? And how does google count them? Votes in the google world are links to your site.
Called “backlinks” in SEO (search engine optimization) terminology, these links occur whenever another site has a link back to yours. While I am oversimplifying matters, you could do worse than encourage other sites to link to your website.
Part of a chamber of commerce? Have you spoken at an event? Make sure that any online presence these events have identify you and your business and most importantly: have a link to your web site. You will be on your way to participating in one of the largest popularity contests there is in the business world.
Do you participate in social networking? Do you comment on other blogs? Participate in online groups such as google groups? In all these activities, make sure that your signature in your post includes a link to your website.
Of course you do not want to just post your business name and website without adding some value. While yes any backlink helps, you also want your link to invite people to click on it. That can be even more valuable than just improving your position in the SERPs, especially if you are in a competitive niche. Also many bloggers moderate (review) comments to their blog and will not post your comment unless it provides some value to the conversation.
Many blogging sites tag backlinks as “no follow”. This tells google not to “follow” the link and not count it. However there is some debate on whether google truly ignores it. Yes, it is not as valuable as a “followed” link but some SEOs believe that it still counts in google’s algorithms. And if you want to find blogs that allow “follows” just search in google for “dofollow blogs”.
How do you find out how many backlinks your site has? In a post I will showcase some tools you install into your Firefox browser (sorry IE users) that will give you this and other SEO information, but for now you can follow the below: Ready?
Type in the following, replacing “yoursite.com” with your website URL: linkdomain:http://www.yoursite.com -site:www.yoursite.com
On the page that appears, look at the upper right for the number of results this query returns
This is the number of backlinks your site has … take some time and see who has linked to you. Can you encourage more of them?
The reason for the “-site:www.yoursite.com” part of the query is to remove all internal linking (pages within your site that link to other pages).
As an SEO practitioner I have looked at a number of backlink profiles, some of very large companies. Backlinks can come from interesting places. Google looks very kindly on backlinks that come from educational institutions (.edu) and to a lesser extent the .orgs. I’ve seen very good quality backlinks that come from sponsoring charitable events. One company got quite a bit of mileage from a “cartoon character” shown on TV that the animation industry created many variants of. Viral food for thought.
Here’s another tip. The “anchor text” (the text comprises the clickable link) is important too. Help the folks linking to your site avoid the dreaded “click here” and ask them to use descriptive language (such as “wellness doctor focusing on back injuries”) in the anchor text.
Finally, if your site has no backlinks and no traffic, consider adding a listing in one of the directories. This is a topic worthy of an article on it’s own, but it might be worth paying for a listing in yahoo business directory or best of web. Some directories are free. Look for topical directories that are related to your business. Just keep in mind the tip about focusing on websites that are well regarded by google and stay away from the many “spammy” directories that google ignores. You may also consider approaching a complementary business and asking them to link to you. If you have an interesting blog or articles that might be of interest to their audience, this often occurs naturally, however sometimes it doesn’t hurt to ask.
Link building can be a time consuming activity and many business outsource this work, however it is just another tool in an business’s tool belt and if you keep your eyes open you can opportunistically capitalize on a “backlinking” opportunity as they arise.
According to a seomoz.org article, page title, or the title tag, is one of the top five SEO ranking factors. After experiencing several phone conversations having to explain what a page title was, and more importantly, helping them locate it (… no higher, above the URL box … at the very top … see it?). I thought I would upload a hastily thrown together image as a reference for future conversations.
Title Tag encircled in red above
But before I did that, I realized I should eat my own dogfood and install the All in One SEO Pack in this wordpress blog. This allows the title tag to be set to something other than the blog post title as well as setting the meta keyword and description tags, eliminating the conflict over choosing a catchy blog post title that is devoid of keywords in favor of a well optimized one. An action long overdue, especially given that I had installed it on quite a few other blogs already.
However to be honest I have spent very little time on SEO of this blog, the subject matter is frightfully competitive and my SEO efforts are better spent elsewhere. But it’s just one of those wordpress plug-ins you should just install.
If you are into SEO (search engine optimization), you probably know who Matt Cutts is. Matt Cutts is a top software engineer at Google, and has a well followed blog. Recently he commented that google may start taking into account site load time in its rankings.
While likely not a factor in the rankings until 2010, and the impact maybe small, it’s something to start thinking about. After all if your site is slow, page rank might be the least of your problems. Owing to the notorious fickleness of users, if you don’t grab their attention in 2 or 3 seconds, they are on to the next thing.
Google webmaster tools has a new feature for you to quickly assess your site’s performance. Under the labs section you will find a “site performance” link that will tell you the average page load time and how you rank against all the other web sites on the internet. If you are slower than 85% of the other web sites on the web, you have some work to do.
I am always amazed at the number of small businesses centers that do not know about Google Local Business Center. The word is getting out there but slowly.
If you search on a keyword phrase that includes a geographic term, especially a city name, you will likely get a list of several results (often 10) that click into a map results. These are local businesses that have a physical presence and relevance for the term you typed in.
The idea was to give local brick and mortar businesses visibility in the SERPS. Usually these businesses have no or an inadequate web presence and can certainly use the help.
Registering with Google Local Business Center is free. You can add pictures and video to your entry. Make sure you have your physical address on your web site and participate in the verification that google will do when you add a listing into the LBC. Check out the below video for more:
Everyone wants their site to be found by google, right? Who wouldn’t want more free traffic delivered to their site? The goal of getting onto page 1 of the SERPs (search engine result pages) is such a holy grail, that a whole service industry called search engine optimization has come into it’s own.
But traffic doesn’t always come from the search engines. And some online businesses are not at all interested in marketing to just anyone, but rather just to a targeted clientele that comes to them virally rather via search.
Meet invitation only sites such as Rue La La a luxury e-tailer that seeks to promote an air of exclusivity. To become a member, you have to be invited, and only then can you have access to its discounted designer goods.
Putting your site behind an authentication prompt, which Rue La La has done, is one way to hide your pages from the search engines. Another is through directives in a file, robots.txt, you place on your site. Sites such as Gilt Groupe, another invite only site have excluded many of their site’s directories from the spiders.
So if you are searching for a killer deal on that Gucci bag online, be aware there are certain sites that are completely hidden from you unless you are “in the know”.
Alexa and Google PR ranks are a quick measure how strong a site is in traffic and from the search engine perspective. They measure very different things but are both important.
An Alexa rank is a calculated measure of unique visitors and pageviews on a given web site. This may be counter intuitive but the lower your Alex rank the better. Now you will find all sorts of debate online on how accurate the rank is, but everyone agrees it is useful as a rough measure of a website’s traffic. And if you are in the top 100,000, congratulations! If you haven’t already you should compare your Alexa rank to your competitor’s website. Is yours higher? Then you have some work to do.
A google PR (page rank) is a little harder to explain as very few people know exactly it is calculated, but it is a measure of how popular and how much of an authority it is. Google PRs range from 1-10, with 10 being the most coveted.
There are also a number of plugins you can install directly into your Firefox browser (if you needed a reason to switch from using Internet Explorer, these tools might just convince you). If you like simple and unobtrusive check out searchstatus. For a more full featured tool you’ll want to download the SEO toolbar from seobook.com.
Unless you can put a tick by most of the elements in our list then your web site is NOT very search engine friendly.
If a search engine is to regard your web site as truly search engine friendly it must be able to tick a lot more of the items in our list than was ever previously the case.
If you can not in all honesty tick enough elements on the list below, then you have some catching up to do, especially when this is not a complete list.
Details on how often to visit
htaccess file used
Related terms on a page relevant to topic
No tracking hosted by other sites
Unique page titles that use keyword phrases
Minimal on-page scripts and inline CSS
No rapid building of site links
Information on the type of page
No pages with similar content
Key pages that are reached in two clicks
Incoming links use keyword phrases
Permanent redirect links to other pages
Link nofollow tag used
Incoming links from topic related sites
Less than 155 character page description
You might also like to try our optimization tutorial quiz to see how search engine friendly your website is compared to our full list of fifty factors.
There are ten questions in our online search engine optimization tutorial quiz that cover all the essential aspects for a search engine friendly website and cover the essential elements of optimization that you should have on your own web site.
An optimization tutorial following the quiz explains why all of the elements are important in making your site well optimized and search engine friendly.
You will not be asked to sign-up for anything, or provide any personal details.
About the Author:
Andy Theekson has 8 years of experience in web site design and search engine optimization and offers free advice and a wide range of website optimization services.
The online community is definitely a large market place that you cannot ignore, especially if you have an internet business. There are thousands if not millions of consumers that you can tap in the internet.
At the same time, the internet also poses a quite different challenge. The easy access that internet provides also gives you as much competition as you can imagine. It is too crowded and congested.
Having a website is not enough to make your business running and able to compete. You must take other alternatives to give way for the online community to access your website at any rate or chance possible.
You have to expose your website. Make it known. It has to be visible. It has to be frequently targeted by consumers and surfers.
Invest in marketing your internet site. There are basically two options available to you, the SEO and PPC. These two are probably the most desirable alternatives you can get for your internet business as strategy for search engine marketing.
1. SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Some researches indicate that 60% – 70% of internet surfers and users actually resort to using the Google search engine to find and locate web sites and pages, for any topic they desire. SEO is the process taken to make sure that the internet uses will find your website when ranked among the top results of a search. This way you can make sure that you will be visible and can clearly stand out from the rest.
To get a search engine optimization, you will have to build on your own internet site frequently hit internet links to web site pages. The process will involve IBLN or Independent Back-Linking Network, wherein hundreds or even thousands of pages will be utilized to promote a particular website of a client.
In SEO, there is no need for you to pay for the clicks although it will require you to spend time doing research to get a favorable combination of ads and target audience. The SEO process is a long term one. It requires months, 6 months at the least, before the proper outcome is fully achieved, but once the goal is accomplished, you will definitely get a steady source of profit.
2. PPC
PPC means Pay Per Click. It gives way advertising on a search engine. These are sponsored listings that you see whenever you make a search. There will be a charge whenever a visitor or web surfer clicks on any of your ads. There will first be a bidding process. The highest bidder for the price per click will definitely get the chance to be first listed in the search engine.
With this kind of advertising, you can still basically control your campaign as you get to create your own ad. You will also manage the target audience and still stay within the bounds of your budget. Most of the providers of PPC advertising will allow you to specify the target market, either by topic, industry or geographical location. You can also very well check if your ad gets to be shown at all and if it is competitive with the rest.
There are some guaranteed benefits when you get to maximize the PPC strategy.
? PPC lets you advertise to the whole of the online community. It is also relatively easy to set up.
? At first glance, PPC advertising may seem very expensive. Could it possibly happen that someone out there will go on clicking on your ad? This will definitely give you a large bill without the expected profit on your part. If this provides a lot of worries, be rest assured that there is a protection for you. Networks are able to recognize fraudulent clicks.
? You can also set a budget for a certain period. The moment your budget has been used up by the target number of clicks, your ads will no longer be displayed until the next period you want it again displayed.
? You will also be able to adjust well to changes in market demands and trends.
In deciding which of the two strategies will work right for you, think of your goals and of your resources. They definitely offer benefits and advantages that will work for your good. The better way to approach this two is to evaluate according to your short term and long term plans. Take the PPC course for your short term goals and choose SEO if you have long term ones.
There world is out there for you now. Just make sure you do what will work best for your entrepreneurial endeavors and visions. The secret to success lies in your hands. Just study your options well and you’ll get exactly what you want.
SEO services have transformed a lot since they started, and with today’s market, a SEO Consultant is becoming more meaningful than ever. The web is a amazing market and there are very distinct ways to get traffic to your pages. SEO has been a amazing way to build your site as well as off page optimization to generate search engine traffic to your site, and many tactics have been invented to do that efficiently as well as inexpensively.
In the new era of the information age there are so many local businesses now online] that tailoring organic SEO services to those markets specifically has become vitally important in competing with other local businesses for the same specific and focused markets.
Although organic SEO is not only designed for local competition and traffic management, tactics that are allowing local businesses that have both an online and offline presence to compete effectively in their respective markets without having to use broadened SEO approach such as targeting traffic of a certain market across local and long distance markets. Occasionally you just want to focus your search engine traffic funneling efforts to, for example, people specific to Sacramento California, and to do that you can use specific keywords used by Sacramentans along with other techniques in your SEO.
There are some complex maneuvers used in local and other focused areas of SEO qualified traffic generation that organic SEO services use to give a site the advantage in their needed market and niche that include actively watching over the competitions site activities, search engine inquiries (i.e. keywords used to arrive at their sites), and so on to gather statistics and data to use in tuning up their clients site to meet and exceed their competitions level of success in aquiring the traffic/market share.
The organic SEO services are a relatively new more focused type of SEO service for the modern world of the online marketplace and the needs of the many new types of markets marketers/companies are looking for. In the beginning the net marketers were looking for a more broad area of traffic and didn’t much care about where it came from so long as it was targeted to their niche, but today with just about every business including brick and mortar companies launching sites to supplement their offline presence as well as bringing in more business to their offline presence (such as restaurants wanting more people to find their restaurant using the web and affordable search engine optimization to accomplish this task, obviously with local residents to their restaurant area).
The web is evolving just like anything else and the latest organic SEO services are great for companies of all types, and people seeking a new variety of focused SEO services and needs. Luckily for many new to the web marketing ideas there are amazing companies that handle the hard part for them!
