Easy Ways to Improve Your Alexa Traffic Ranking

Easy Ways to Improve Your Alexa Traffic Ranking:

• Install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as your homepage.
• Create a customized version of the Alexa tool bar, Then place a link on your site to the download page and invite your visitors to download it. You will also earn Amazon commissions every time a user shops on Amazon via the toolbar link.
• Copy and paste an Alexa rank widget onto your website. You can get the widget code at http://www.alexa.com/site/site_stats/signup. As well as informing your visitors about your Alexa rank, it will also keep Alexa updated about the number of unique visitors surfing your site.
• If you have a Wordpress blog there is a plug-in for Alexa Ranking (wp-Alexa-redirect-0.3plug-in) that you can use. Editor's Note: This plugin may no longer work.
• Submit your site to web directories. Although a lot of directories charge a registration fee, you can still find many that are willing to líst your site free of charge or in exchange for a reciprocal link. A lot of the webmasters who browse web directories have the Alexa bar installed, so if they clíck your link it will help your Alexa traffic rank.
• Become an active participant on Internet marketing and SEO forums. Again, a lot of those forum participants are already webmasters and a high percentage will use the Alexa toolbar when they surf. Place a link to your site in your signature and your rank will improve when any of those people clíck through.
• A lot of Asian and Australian websites feature in the Alexa top 100,000 and you can bet that a lot of website owners will have the Alexa toolbar installed, so it makes sense to join social networking sites that are popular in those regions, such as:
  http://www.orkut.com - Orkut is owned by Google and is the second most visited site in India.
  http://hi5.com - Hi5 has an Alexa ranking of 17 at the time of writing this article.
• Become an Alexa expert and post articles that discuss Alexa ranking and SEO tips. This will attract people to your site who may be interested in downloading your toolbar, or people who have already done so. Either way, it will be good for your Alexa ranking. You could even build a whole category of articles on your website devoted to this theme.
• Set up a freebie page on your website and post a líst of useful tools to attract other website owners to your site. Include another link to your Alexa toolbar download page.
• Get into the habit of using Stumbleupon and other bookmarking sites to spread the word whenever you post a new article on your website or blog. Set up a group of fellow website owners so that you can have run reciprocal stumbling campaigns for better results.
  

Note: If you apply these ten quick and easy methods you will definitely see an improvement in your Alexa rank and you should also start to attract more traffíc to your site!

Ritu

10 Ways To More Website Traffic

10 Ways To More Website Traffic

Every website needs more traffic. This traffic needs to be as targeted as possible to the site you are promoting, whether it is your own web site or an affiliate program. This is the lifeblood of the business. No traffic - No business, More traffic - More sales

The question is - How do you get this highly targeted web site traffic.

I will list some of the most popular methods.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization, (SEO), is making web pages attractive to the search engines. The better optimized your web page is, the higher a ranking it will achieve in the search engines. Most people searching the internet only look at the first couple of search results.

So optimizing for the search engines focuses on techniques such as making sure that each web page is using the appropriate title tags and meta tags, and that the keyword or key phrases for the particular pages are distributed throughout the content. Search engines find and catalog web pages using spidering software.

These are just a few ways to get more web site traffic.


Link popularity

This is achieved when other sites have links to your site. If a high traffic site has links, the search engines perceive both sites must be popular. The important thing is to have quality web sites linking back to your site.

Why should anyone want to link to your site? If you have quality content, this adds perceived value and makes your site popular, so others will want to link to you.The type of content could be:

Free downloads
Free reports, articles, ezine or newsletter
Video
Links to other good sites

Reciprocal Links

This is where you exchange links with other quality sites. You can create a links page on your site. This create a resource that visitors will want to return to. Find quality (there's that word again) web sites related to your subject and contact the webmaster about exchanging links.


Article Submissions

Submitting articles is a great way to build back links and web site visitors. Your articles can become 'viral' when others want to re-publish them on their sites, or use them in their newsletters and ezines. You include links to your site in the author resource box offering more free information. The resource box is your chance to convince the reader to visit your web site.
Two of the most popular places to post your articles are http://www.goarticles.com and http://www.EzineArticles.com.


Forum Posting

In order to be successful using forums there are some things that are required. Do Your Homework: Prior to joining any forum, you must do some research. Join relevant forums that are in some way related to the promotion's primary sales market. Choose popular forums. There is no point in wasting your time and energy on forums that few members and few posts. Page raking and the amount of active members are two good ways to check for this. Choose forums that allow sig tags. Read the rules before joining and pay attention to them.

You've Joined: now what?

Keep your sig tag short and update it regularly. The ideal thing is to limit yourself to one link, preferably to your main website. Never create posts that are nothing more than an advertisement. This is a universal rule. At best this kind of post will be deleted by the monitors, at worst, you will be banned. Be an active member on the forum. Plan to spend at least an hour each day there. Get to know the users. Iintroduce yourself with intelligent questions depending upon the forum's topic.

Use Your Sig file to the best advantage and within the rules. Some Forums have places where you can advertise and give special deals to members.


Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Of all the pay per click search engines, Google Adwords is the largest and most popular.
This method, when done correctly, will increase your exposure, and give fast results. You must keep up to date with Google's rules, so be sure to read them. You pay a one off fee when you register and set up your campaign. You can have your campaign up and running in minutes. There is a minimum bid, but of course you will have to pay more than this. But the beauty of Adwords is you can set a daily budget of how much you are willing to spend.

You can create as many campaigns as you want, and then test your ads (changing the headline for example).

Google provide tools to help you with your campaigns, and have exellent tutorials that walk you through everything from signing up to creating your Adwords campaigns.


Directory Submissions

Submit your website url's to the search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN.


Ezine advertising

Most ezines accept advertising. Ezines are online or email newsletters. They are used to build a relationship between a webmaster and a web site visitor, with news, updates, special offers etc. But as always they should have quality content. You place an ad in ezines that are highly targeted towards your niche. Prices depend on the ezine, and also the position of the ad. The most expensive is the solo ad, where yours is the only ad.


Social Bookmarking

In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are both accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

Social Bookmarking can bring immediate traffic to your website, as web 2.0 community websites such as Technorati, Digg, Reddit and Tailrank provide almost immediate information on various topics. These type of Bookmarking sites index and categorize content usually faster than the major search engines. People looking for the latest information on certain topics usually refer to these types of services.

Bookmarking Accounts to check out:
http://digg.com
http://technorati.com

You can increase your Bookmarking using the free submission site http://www.OnlyWire.com to bookmark many accounts at once. When you signup to OnlyWire.com you can use many bookmark accounts and with one simple procedure bookmark your blog post to all your accounts at once.

OnlyWire.com interfaces with:

Backflip
Bibsonomy
Blinklist
Blogmemes
Blue Dot
de.lirio.us
del.icio.us
Diigo
Furl
Jots
Linkroll
Looklater
ma.gnolia
Markaboo
Rawsugar
Shadows
Simpy
Spurl
Wink


If you don't have a Bookmark Account for the ones listed go and sign up.
Viral Traffic using free reports - ebooks etc.




Thanks

Ritu

Branding V/S Search Engine Optimization

How To Select Keywords For Search Engine Optimization

One of the most important decisions while beginning search engine optimization is the selection of the correct keywords. It can make or break your website. Potential customers search the web for desired sites using he keywords. The right methods of selecting a keyword will aid in creating and supporting a site-wide SEO strategy. The wrong methods will run you in circles, wondering what went wrong.

Determining keywords is an art. To create a list of keywords you need to know your website backwards and forwards including what the site features, and what it doesn’t’ feature. It’s best way is to put yourself in the customer’s shoe. While writing the content you should remember to use words that are not only related to the content, but are popular search words as well. This is called keyword optimization, or choosing the most searched keywords related to your content.


Follow the following for keyword optimization:

Create a great keyword list: To begin with, spend some time listing all of the words and phrases related to your website content, taking ideas from everyone you can think of and list them all. Once the list is prepared visit competitors' sites to find the meta tags used.

Lengthen the List: Once a good list of pseudo-generic keywords is found, the next step is lengthening that list by using a Keyword tool like Overture. The moment a keyword is plugged in the tool, it will return the number of searches conducted for that term over a given period of time as well as suggest similar keywords from the tool’s database. Now go through the list given by the keyword tool and compare with yours. Copy any and all similar terms as well as their corresponding search values, which relate directly to the site you’re optimizing. Then, paste them to a spreadsheet program so that they can be further edited later.

Narrowing the List: In order to narrow the list three variables should be considered:

1. The number of searches on a particular keyword
2. The Amount of Competition
3. Will the keyword lead to conversions

Branding V/S Search Engine Optimization

Branding Versus Search Engine Optimization

A brand is a collection of images and ideas representing an economic producer; more specifically, it refers to the concrete symbols such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme. A marketing process used to appeal machine algorithms and increase search engine relevance and ultimately web traffic is termed as Search engine optimization (SEO).

Companies are put into a dilemma of deciding upon their keywords as to whether to promote their own brand name as their main keyword phrase or optimize for a more generic keyword phrase.

Trademark infringement is another issue intellectual property act says branded name used by one company cannot be used by some other company. Though large companies have the right to protect themselves from others stealing traffic, however they cannot protect a generic term. In this case company needs to optimize their websites for all possible keywords including their own brand names, generic, high-traffic keywords and keyword phrases relevant to their sites to create the largest return on investment.

The highest conversion rate is provided by branded search terms, suggests a new research. But when used properly, non-branded terms can significantly affect the outcome of a paid SEM (define) campaign. Searchers tend to click generic, non-brand terms earlier in the search process and more on brand terms when they're closer to making a purchase. This suggests search marketers can leverage non-brand search terms to drive searchers toward brand terms later in the search and purchase consideration process.

Brand keywords are those with the name of the marketer or marketer-owned site or having a trademark. Non-brand keywords are those that don't include any reference to the marketer, site, trademarks, or proprietary brands.

Basic Web Design Guidelines

The most important thing for the success of your website is its look. The services and the products that you offer are judged by the appearance of your website. Many business failure occurred due to poor web designing. We sometimes don’t pay attention towards the appearance of your website which may lead to closing of website. Web designing is an art and there is a need to follow basic steps to become a good web designer.

Designing a Template

As we know that “First Impression Is the Last Impression”, so the template you design for your website should be consistent so that each web page should look as a part of one website. The most important thing for website designing is – designing a template. The template you make can be use to create each page of your web site. This will give entire site the same look and feel.

A template can be considered as a simple web page or shell of your entire web site. However, it won’t contain any content but it must contain the logos, images, links etc. but every time you create a template, you’ll save it with different page name.

Formatting Your Pages

It is highly recommend designing your entire page content within HTML tables. Tables will enable you to have complete control over your content and how it will be displayed. Tables also give structured look to your website.

For example, you can create three tables, stacked on top of each other, for each section of content. You can use cellpadding, cellspacing and border attributes give a right flow to your data. The top table would contain your page header content, the middle table would contain your content and the bottom table would contain your footer content.

As placing your entire page content within a single table will significantly increase your site's load time, stacking your tables will enable you to benefit from the powerful formatting capabilities of tables, while at the same time, keep your site's load time down.

Tables will enable you to display your content in sections like a newspaper, set up a specific number of rows and columns, and even place additional tables within your main content table to create special content sections with colored backgrounds.


Storefront of Your Page

The main page of your sit is the storefront for your business and it should be specifically designed in such a way that your visitors know exactly what you're offering. If your prospective customer can't find your product or service, they definitely won't waste a lot of time looking for it. They'll go on to the next site and probably never return. They are visiting your site for specific purpose so provide them what they want. If you do so than it will give benefits to you and your site.

Branding will play a major role in your success. Make sure you place your company logo and slogan on your home page as well as other pages also. This will not only provide publicity to your site but also give the same look and feel.

Instead of trying to cram all your content into your main page, consider creating sections. These sections can contain highlights of your information with a link to further information. You can set your sections up in tables with colored heading sections for information such as articles, products or whatever you'd like.

Last but not the least use the golden rule “less is more”. In other words, keep your main page content concise and impressive which includes all the important elements.

Navigation

When you start designing your pages, keep in mind, your visitor visit each and every page of your website. Provide good navigational links on each and every page. Place your navigational links to any corner of your page where you find is the suitable place for it. Use tables for the uniform appearance throughout.

Fonts

One of the most significant parts of a web page is text. The way in which you present the text on your web page will have a great impact on your success. It can make your page look very professional or very unprofessional.

When placing text within your web page, always be consistent with your fonts. In other words, don't use different fonts throughout your pages. Headlines are written in larger font size and are a bit different.

Background and Text Colors

Use caution when selecting your background and text colors. Busy backgrounds make text difficult to read and draw the attention away from the text. In addition, always be consistent with your background theme on each page of your site.

Select your colors very carefully, as colors affect your mood and will have an affect on your visitors as well.

Bright colors can be used to show cheerful or happy emotions. Colors such as blue and purple have a calming effect. While dark colors, such as brown and black, have a depressing effect.

The Things that are avoided If you really want to design a good website than avoid the use of frames, flashes, complex URL, scrolling texts and high animations, outdated information etc. If you follow these steps than sooner your website will become famous and will be on top of the search engines.

Link Popularity Services

Link popularity measures popularity of a site in terms of number of sites or web pages the site is linked to. Link popularity is a measure of both the quantity and quality of sites that link to your site. Link Popularity is the number of on the On-topic quality hyperlinks pointed to your web site or Webpage.

It is important for top search engine ranking that website should have theme based quality links from sites which are related to it so that even the user who is searching for the required information can come to the right place. Link popularity of the site can be found by typing in your domain name in the box and hitting the 'search' button. Link popularity can increase your traffic to the site in many ways. Links bring visitors in from other sites and link analysis is an important part of the ranking algorithm used by all the major search engines.

There are 5 main ways to get inbound links to your Web site. a) Links based on content, b) Web directories, c) reciprocal links, d) link rentals, e) syndicated articles. When you have quality content and lots of it, other Web sites will naturally link to your Web site. Directory links are placed on pages with other links that are related. Reciprocal links are link trades and are two way links. Link rentals are links that are placed in the footer or one of the side columns of the Web page the link is placed on. You pay a monthly rental fee for these links. Syndicated articles are articles you write and offer to other Web sites which publish them on the site. The Web sites that publish the articles give a link the author's Web site for the right to publish the article.

For maximum link popularity the key is to select a provider who will offer the following:

1. A vastly distributed network that is not interlinked and doesn't share any C-Block IP addresses
2. Linking pages that contain some relevant content that has been well-linked through a sitemap system
3. Pages that are as close to naturally-designed and built as possible
4. Pages that link not only to your site(s) but to other relevant, related sites as well.

Sophisticated Ranking Algorithms

Development Of More Sophisticated Ranking Algorithms

The Internet was reaching a vast population of non-technical users who were often unable to use advanced querying techniques to reach the information they were seeking and the sheer volume and complexity of the indexed data was vastly different from that of the early days. Combined with increases in processing power, search engines have begun to develop different sortys of algorithms.

A complex mathematical formula used by a search engine to rank the webpages that it finds by crawling the Web is termed as ranking algorithms. Google was the first of its kind started by two PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Every search engine (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com) has its own relevancy algorithm (rules for ranking), which is continuously developing as search engines are learning from their experience. The search engines' algorithms are very top secret. There are many people working outside the search engine industry to attempt to reverse engineer the code in order to understand their working in an attempt to help people to rank higher in the results. No search engine reveals exactly how its own algorithm works to protect itself from competitors and those who wish to spam the search engine.

As a search engine may use hundreds of factors in ranking the listings on its SERPs; the factors themselves and the weight each carries can change continually, and algorithms can differ widely, with a web page that ranks #1 in a particular search engine possibly ranking #200 in another search engine, or even on the same search engine a few days later.

Some sites focus on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. This has spawned an online industry, that survives to this day, focused upon selling links designed to improve PageRank and link popularity, and not to drive human site visitors, with links from higher PageRank pages selling for the most money.

Signals influencing a page's rankings include:

1.Keywords in the title tag.
2.Keywords in links pointing to the page.
3.Keywords appearing in visible text.
4. Link popularity (PageRank for Google) of the page.