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Whether you value your Alexa traffic ranking or not there are definite advantages to having a high AlexRank. Many webmasters and business folk look at the AlexaRank as a reasonable representation of a site’s traffic. If you are selling advertising from your site the more “proof” you can demonstrate of your traffic – and in AlexaRank’s case it is an independent valuation of your traffic, which adds credibility – the more likely advertisers will come knocking at your door willing to give you some of their ad budget.

An AlexaRank Experiment

AlexaRank is calculated using the Alexa Toolbar. Alexa takes the browsing data from the millions of people using the Toolbar and calculates the traffic ranking of each site. As Alexa states, while low traffic sites are harder to gauge accurately, once a site reaches a 100,000 or less ranking the accuracy of the measure increases. Hence if you can top a 10,000 AlexaRank, or even 1000, the credibility of that ranking is increased.

As Blaine Moore pointed out in a comment made to my previous AlexaRank article, it is easy to – as he put it – “game” the AlexaRank if you have a tool that checks AlexaRank installed on your computer, and that doesn’t have to be just the toolbar, it can be for a FireFox extension like SearchStatus, which I recently installed on my browser. These tools send data to Alexa, and when Alexa receives any data about your surfing habits it will raise the traffic rankings for the sites you provide data for – and if you visit your own sites often you can raise your ranking.

I can’t verify that installing any AlexaRank checking tool will help your own site’s AlexaRank and to be honest after I installed SearchStatus I did not notice any significant change in my AlexaRank at my blogs. It wasn’t until I conducted a different experiment that I noticed more verifiable proof of a technique to increase your site’s AlexaRank.

How I Increased My AlexaRank By More Than 25%

Here’s how my logic went – I figured the toolbar and other AlexaRank checking tools tell Alexa my browsing habits, which is fine, but I’m only one person visiting my blogs (albeit I do it many times each day). What I really want is a way to tell Alexa about every person who visits my blogs, not just me. In order to do this, the Alexa reporting tool needs to be on my blog and downloaded by every person who visits my site each time they visit.

The obvious answer was to install an Alexa Site Widget on each of my blogs. The widget works like this:

If you click it you will be taken to my current Alexa traffic ranking data. You can also find the live widget in the sidebar of all my blogs. After installing this widget on to my blogs, within the next few days my rankings increased at least 25%. Prior to this gain my AlexaRank increases had been slow and steady, but never as significant as this in a short period of time, unless of course I earned a traffic spike from some other site(s) linking to me.

This makes complete sense, as my thinking above explains. If every visitor to your blog downloads the Alexa site widget when they visit your site, then Alexa has data on every visitor you have, at least every web reader, I don’t think RSS readers count since they never download the widget unless they go to your site. You might call this “gaming” your AlexaRank, but in this case I don’t think that’s an apt description – installing the site widget in fact helps to give Alexa enough data to provide your true AlexaRank, as opposed to what it thinks it should be based on the data it has from it’s toolbar users.

If you sell advertising from your blog or website then you should care about your AlexaRank. If that is the case then installing the Alexa site widget is a must. It takes only a few seconds and could significantly improve your current AlexaRank.
If any other bloggers or webmasters out there notice an increase in their AlexaRank after following my instructions and installing a site widget I’d love to hear about it. While I’m confident my results are good enough proof, it doesn’t hurt to have more examples to back up the hypothesis. Please leave a comment and tell me how your AlexaRank improves.

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Deliberate creation is the act of deciding what you want, and getting it. While that might sound very simple and easy, and you might be thinking you already do it, thereís actually a little bit more to it than you think. Rather than us just choosing a goal to go after and going after it, deliberate creation requires a certain focus to succeed.

Many of us think we want something and decide that weíre going to have it, whether itís some type of person or professional success, money, a specific job, a partner or something else. But in the end, we donít get that thing no matter how hard we try. And often weíre left confused as to why it didnít work out as we had planned.

Deliberate creation works with the idea that we truly have to believe in something before it can happen. The person who decides he wants a new car thatís a little out of his price range, for instance, may really want the car. He may be passionate about wanting the car. But most of the times he thinks of the car he also thinks about how heís going to have a hard time affording the car.

Deliberate creation attempts to remove that negative thinking. When you want something but you believe that achieving it is going to be difficult, it becomes difficult. Likewise, if you want something but secretly or not-so-secretly believe that getting it is impossible, then it will be impossible.

When creating deliberately, the person takes complete charge of his or her reality and spends time acting on things rather than reacting to them. Thereís a large focus on action vs. reaction. Where itís typically to get up in the morning with several goals or several tasks in mind that relate to a larger goal, those who practice acting rather than reacting will get up and focus on what they want instead of just reacting to things that happen or need to be done.

When you use this method of going about your day, the main principle is to surround yourself with what inspires you and makes you passionate about life. Itís important to first figure out what it is that you truly want. Itís believed that most people donít even know what it is that they want, deep down.

Once you figure out what youíre most passionate about, then deliberate, also sometimes called conscious, creation removes the obstacles in your way. Much of this happens within yourself, regarding the way you think about things. You learn to believe that things are possible.

Then you learn to focus. Focus is a key term because itís the focus that fans of the method claim make everything good possible. First, whatever your passion really is, whatever it is that you really want, must be believed to be possible. Then, you must focus on it and not lose that focus. The combination of belief and keeping what you want most in focus make up the deliberate creation that will allow you to achieve your dream.

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Why Directories Are Important

Directories should play a major role in your SEO efforts, well, at least the big and important ones, for the following reasons:

• Listings within major directories provide “context” to search engines. For example, if your web site is listed in the Open Directory Project under the category Pets -> Weird Pets -> Blue Cats, search engines will assume your web site has something to do with blue cats. Your web site and pages will be indexed faster and might have a better ranking in search results for specific terms (in this case, “blue cats”).

• Major directories (such as Yahoo! Directory, ODP, Jayde etc.) have high page ranks and as long as you obtain a non-reciprocal listing from them, paid or unpaid, your page rank will benefit greatly.

• Major directories are often replicated by other web sites (think of ODP, with hundreds of copies) which means that a listing somewhere in such a major directory will cause listings in all replica sites, contributing towards your link popularity efforts and boosting page ranks.

• The ODP (Open Directory Project) feeds results to Google, AOL, AltaVista, Lycos, Netscape – once again, a presence in ODP can get you quite far.

Submitting to Directories

As with most good things in life, you need to make efforts to get into quality directories. Although detailed instructions on how to submit your web sites are always provided by the directories, there are certain aspects to consider before you start hunting for directories and submit your web sites:

• Start with Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project: being listed in the two of them is worth more than being listed in all other directories together! You will find soon enough that, unfortunately, being listed in these two is the hardest thing to do: Yahoo requires a 9 annual fee for regular web sites (only non-commercial sites qualify for a free listing) and 0 for adult sites, while ODP is free but you need A LOT of luck to make your way into it. ODP is so large yet is strictly human edited, which means the waiting time for a listing can extend to even years! Make your duty as a SEO worker and submit your web site, but don’t get your hopes too high, unfortunately.

• Religiously follow the submission guidelines provided by directories: read them as many times as you need to make sure you will not upset its editors by submitting your site the wrong way, with inaccuracies, the wrong description style, or to the wrong category.

• Try to find niche directories if your web site’s content is suitable for that. For example, if your web site covers Marketing topics, focus your efforts into finding a Marketing-only directory (such as MarketingWHO.com) and submit your site there: search engines love links from sites relevant to yours!

• You will probably come across many directories with paid inclusions: use your common sense to appreciate if it’s worth it or not. A good criteria is to check their Google Page Rank: if it’s at least 3 levels higher than your site’s Page Rank, it’s probably worth spending the money for the inclusion fee. However, do look for directories with a flat, one-time fee rather than recurring monthly or annual fees: you’ll end up spending less money!

In the end, remember a simple rule: if it’s too easy to get into a directory, it’s probably not worth the effort to get into it in the first case.

Stephen Creed is the author of this article and he proudly own a website called: One Week Marketing. His website blogs contains advanced strategies on internet marketing are available for all to learn here: One Week Rarketing review. Visit his website, One Week Marketing, so that you don’t missed out great learning in the internet marketing world.

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SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is something that many webmasters are now obsessing over. Many web site owners are spending countless hours tweaking and modifying their web sites, adding keyword rich content, and spending hours obtaining back links, so that their site will rank higher in search engines. It is true that over 90% of all web surfers use search engines to visit sites on a regular basis, but:

Should web masters and web site designers build and tweak sites for search engines, or for their visitors?

The answer to this question is that when you build a web site, you are not targeting web search engine crawlers, you are targeting people and human visitors. Hence, you should build a web site for humans, not search engines. The whole purpose to create a web site is so that you can get traffic. Without traffic, a web site is worthless. No matter how many features and how functional your site is, without traffic, your design and functionality do not matter. Although search engines can help bring in traffic, web sites that are designed for search engines, are often not designed for human visitors and all the traffic that your web site gets will be worthless. Visitors will visit and then soon leave your web site and not return again. Return visitors are critical for the success of any web site.

One good example of optimizing for search engines purely is some webmasters tend to stuff tons of keywords into the Meta-Tags; this is a very bad practice and will get the site blacklisted. Moreover, this black hat technique does not benefit the users.

Hence, when building a web site, one should build it for human visitors. If you have articles that are too keyword dense, the quality of the writing will not be as high as it should, and quite frankly, many of your visitors will be annoyed if you keep using words such as “mesothelioma” or “home insurance loan” to get your web site high in the search rankings for these terms. They will leave your web site and most likely not return.

If you create a web site where content is created for people to read and is well written, chances are you will get many return visitors who like the quality of the content you provide and come back frequently to read any new content you may have added. The more people that visit and link to your web site, the more popular it well become and naturally, it will be ranked higher in search engines.

Also, rather than spending hours building links for SEO purposes, that time could be better spent on adding features to your web site which would prompt more people to return to your site and stay at your web site for a longer period of time.

In conclusion, although spending lot of time on SEO and increasing your search engine rankings in the short run, the visitors you get from your SEO efforts will not be valuable as chances are they will not visit again. If you build your web sites for people, your traffic will grow and search engine rankings will rise naturally. Hence, the best way to build a successful web site is to build for people and allow your web site to naturally move up search engine rankings.

Stephen Creed is the author of this article and he proudly own a website called: One Week Marketing. His website blogs contains advanced strategies on internet marketing are available for all to learn here: One Week Marketing review. Visit his website, One Week Marketing, so that you don’t missed out great learning in the internet marketing world.

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