Blogging matters

For those of you following our little traffic ranking exercise -

When we started this exercise (9/22), Dohertyassoc.com had a Alexa traffic rank of: 3,740,178. In October, we had a traffic rank of 1,969,422, January 2009 was 1,183,946, April we had gotten to 869,376.

Currently Doherty's traffic rank is 1,696,815

So what happened? We got busy, and let the website slide and lo and behold - no new content, traffic slips.

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.