Increasing Alexa rankings

The two tools we use most to monitor our web efforts are Google Analytics and Alexa.com.

The folks over at SiteProNews have done a good job sumarizing 10 Free and Easy Ways to Improve Your Alexa Ranking, check it out.

To be successful you need to be constantly measuring your progress towards your goals. Regularly measuring your website data will tell you what's working, what needs to be changed and what's missing.

You can Download the Alexa Toolbar for free.

Is it working?

Many of our clients have impressive websites and blogs on which they have lavished huge amounts of money, time and love. So I ask, “Is it working?”

Typically, we get an answer along the lines of: "I think so."

"And how do you measure your website's success?" No response.

In business, we measure and analyze everything. We pour over receivables and agings, we slice and dice sales data but our websites - well, we figure if they are up they must be working. Really?

Like everything else, you have to measure an activity to see what is working and to determine what needs an adjustment. Alexa.com let’s us measure traffic. If we try something new on the website and we see a spike in traffic, then we know its working. If we offer a coupon on the blog and customers redeem the coupon, then we know the campaign was a success.

Try incorporating these two tools to measure the success of you website –

• Alexa.com - let’s us measure traffic.
• Google Analytics – shows us which page designs, headlines, and graphics convert the most visitors. further, it tells us where traffic is coming from, where they go on the site and how long they stay (bounce rate).

Don’t assume because you have a website that you have traffic. As you begin to measure your progress, you’ll begin to fine tune your Internet Strategy for more traffic and ultimately more sales.

Watching the Competition

Another reason we love www.alexa.com is all the competitive analysis we can glean from the site. For those of you that don’t know, Alexa is a ranking site based solely on traffic. The more traffic you have, the higher the ranking (1 being the best).

So naturally, this would be the place to look and see what other sites are doing to help boost their traffic. Enter in one of your keywords and see what pops up. Find a popular site (ranking closest to 1) and click on site info. From you here you can find

• Sites linking in – that may also be willing to link to you.
• Related links – Other websites you may not have known about. New competition?
• Company info – The site, the contacts, etc.
• Wayback Machine - which provides insights into when the launched a new page, or updated there look or how long they’ve been around – as you know Google gives older pages more credibility.

You may be surprised what a little surfing can do. How long have they been in the business? Who do they partner with? What are their strengths and weaknesses? This information can help you anticipate your competition's next moves.

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?