Alexa rank breakthrough

Just a quick update to my last post, today our e-commerce or ecommerce (which do you prefer?) shopping site that we operate as a part-time activity has just hit the top 1 Million in Alexa! We have done that on our own without the use of any SEO companies. In the future when we are more profitable I may well engage a specialist company to assist, and there are some good ones out there, but for now am content to work away at the Search Engine Optimization of our business sites myself.

I am very pleased with the results and have lots of plans for the site. Its Alexa rank is now 994,840 and climbing quite dramatically. But it is important not to get carried away with one ranking or another, as happy as I am about making it to the top One Million already what does it really mean?

What is even more important is how it ranks in terms of the keywords we are targetting - can it be found by our customers when they are looking to buy something? Is it linked to by many other sites? Do people buy from it or just browse and leave? How long do people stay on the site or do they just "bounce off"? Do customers come back? Does our site provide some real value to customers? Do the customers recognise that value? Can it be easily found in organic searches? Does it achieve our business goals such as making a profit? Does it generate leads for backend sales and profits? And much much more.

A much longer post is brewing on this topic but meanwhile here are a few great articles I came across recently on the topics of Search Engine Optimisation, Keyword rankings and similar topics. Hope you find them useful.

• http://www.alexa.com/help
• http://blog.alexa.com/2009/04/why-does-my-alexa-rank-jump-around-the.html
• http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
• http://www.submitplus.com/trafficpro.htm
• http://www.orangesoda.com/search-engine-optimization-blog
• http://www.seoquake.com/articles/en/
• http://www.orangesoda.com/pay-per-click-blog/what-not-to-do-on-your-ppc-campaign/
• http://blog.orangesoda.com/no-secret-sauce-to-ppc

Until next time

Owen

Latest Alexa Rankings of our Sites

Many posts ago I mentioned the Alexa rankings of this blog
http://the-small-internet-business-blog.blogspot.com/2009/02/measuring-search-rank-of-this-blog.html

and the Top One 500 to One Million sites in the World.
http://the-small-internet-business-blog.blogspot.com/2009/02/top-500-sites-on-web.html

So what has happened to the search rankings of this blog, and several other sites we run since then?

Where were we?
Back in mid February this blog, my career blog: http://careerblog.owenmcnamara.com/ and our new and very rough at the time company website: http://www.knowledgestream.com.au/ were all unranked. That is if you went into Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/) there was insufficient data for any of our new sites and so they had no ranking.

Now where are we now?
Today this blog ranks at 3,400,745
(http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/the-small-internet-business-blog.blogspot.com)

The Career Blog ranks at 2,503,229
(http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/next-career-move.blogspot.com)

Our company website, definitely better than it was, ranks at 2,093,571 (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/www.knowledgestream.com.au)

My new, as yet empty, WordPress (or Joomla and Wordpress - still thinking on that) blog ranks at 3,220,059 (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/owenmcnamara.com)

And our new e-commerce web site, launched just one month ago already ranks at: 1,456, 787

How we did that, in such a short time, is a long story and I will put together a blog sometime. I wonder where all those sites and more will be in 3, 6, 9 months from now? I expect they will slowly grow and then plateau, but I am not sure what the level of that is as yet.

To put those numbers above in perspective go to the SiteInfo section of Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo) and try out a few company sites you know to see where they are. Some will be very high and some much lower than you expect.

What does it all mean?
Does the Alexa ranking of your site matter? What is the relationship, if any, with the organic search results for your site? Should you care?

Well, like most things, it depends. I will continue this very interesting topic in my next blog later in the week.

Until then, below is a presentation I came across that has some useful information.

Owen

Top 10 SEO Public Relations Tips: TopRank

View more presentations from Lee Odden.