Meet Alexa

We all spend plenty of money to launch our websites. We spend endless hours creating content and writing blogs. Why do we do this? Traffic, of course!

Sadly, many small businesses subscribe to the "If we build it, they will come" brand of online marketing. Like anything else in your business, to see if something is working, you have to measure it. That's where one of my favorite free web tools - Alexa.com - comes in. It provides you the page rank of your site (or any other site, for that matter), which reflects the amount of traffic running through your site.

You've launched a new SEO campaign, is it working? Check your page rank. You've sent a mailer, offering a discount to your web customers, again check the page rank to measure its success.

Some other nifty things at Alexa.com include a free broken links tool under the developer's corner. There is nothing more frustrating to your reader than to hit a broken link.

And the number one key to building traffic is in bound links. Alexa lets you see who links into your site (or who links into your competitors). Simply pull up the site info on your site and select Sites Linking in.

Did I mention it was free?

Why Doesn’t Anybody Visit My Website?

So, you’ve built a website and posted it for the world to see. Having launched your global marketing campaign, just sit back and reap the rewards. Sounds too good to be true? That’s because it is.

A successful website must be accessible to customers. So, unless customers can find your website, it doesn’t matter how amazing it is or how good your product is. According to Netcraft, there are over 80 million websites on the internet (in 2006), and the number is growing. With all that spam and cyber noise, how will you lead your customers to the treasure on your site?

You have to leave clues (search words, Meta Tags, and computer language markers) so search engines can recognize the value in your site, and lead your potential customers directly to you. Your clues must be clear so that customer web searches by key “search words” will return your website first in the list of results, at the top of the customer’s “search engine ranking."

But what if this is the first you’ve heard of Meta Tags, search word and search engine rankings? Do you need to hire a specialist to optimize your Internet website? One of the quickest way to answer this is to consider where is your time best spent.

There are benefits to hiring an outside service as well. Assuming you have selected a quality SEO company, you will be getting the services of well-trained and very experienced professionals rather than relying on your brother-in-law, who also keeps the books.

Impact Direct offers a helpful guideline on How to select an SEO Company.

SEO 101 - Why Doesn’t Anybody Visit My Website?

Using Meta Tags and Search Engine Rankings to Make an Impact
By Chris Freise

So, you’ve built a website and posted it for the world to see. Having launched your global marketing campaign, just sit back and reap the rewards. Sounds too good to be true? That’s because it is.

A successful website must be accessible to customers. So, unless customers can find your website, it doesn’t matter how amazing it is or how good your product is. In January 2003, there were more than 40 million commercial (.com) websites on the Internet, and the number is growing. With all that spam and cyber noise, how will you lead your customers to the treasure on your site?

Source: Internet Software Consortium (http://www.isc.org/),

Distribution of Top-Level Domain Names by Host Count Jan 2003

You have to leave clues (search words, Meta Tags, and computer language markers) so search engines can recognize the value in your site, and lead your potential customers directly to you. Your clues must be clear so that customer web searches by key “search words” will return your website first in the list of results, at the top of the customer’s “search engine ranking”.

But what if this is the first you’ve heard of Meta Tags, search word and search engine rankings? Do you need to hire a specialist to optimize your Internet website? Or do you take the time to develop another skill that you can easily add to your expertise as a self-sufficient entrepreneur? Often businesses do not have the budget to hire an outside firm expressly to increase their site’s search engine rankings, and many who do have the budget will find it useful to learn the ins and outs of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Below, are some basic techniques to enhance your website’s visibility on the Internet. Welcome to SEO 101.