DIGITAL ENTERPRISE

Archive for October, 2009

Here’s a quick and easy search engine optimization (SEO)
technique that anyone can use to generate free, high Google
pagerank links to their site.

SEO in a nutshell: get quality links to your site; the higher
the pagerank, the better.

The problem is that if you submit your site to a high pagerank
directory or search engine, it can take months for your site to
appear. Moreover, many high PR directories and search engines
charge big bucks for the privilege of getting listed with them.
For example, the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) directory takes
several months or more to list a site. And Yahoo charges $299
per year for a commercial site to be listed in their directory.

While it’s great to be listed in these directories and search
engines, many will automatically find and list your site free if
you have good quality links to your site. High pagerank links to
your site indicate to many search engines that other sites that
they rate highly link to you. Therefore, they conclude, your
site will probably be useful to their users. So you deserve a
higher pagerank, according to Google. And the higher your
pagerank, the better your search engine visibility. It’s part of
the SEO game and you can learn how to play.

Now here’s my secret to getting some high pagerank sites to link
to you immediately and at no charge.

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1. Additional Exposure For Your Site.

At the end of 2003, Alexa.com’s results were being closely linked into the listings of its’ parent company, Amazon.com. This currently means that when someone reviews your site, it is linked to their amazon profile, which can be accessed when people browsing for books look to see what reviewers like them suggest. In the future, it could mean that amazon.com will integrate your web site in other ways, such as showing a list of websites related to popular topics such as marketing.

2. Alexa’s relationship with Google.com

See if you can name one major partnership that Google.com or Amazon.com has had where the other party came out worse off in the end.

Yahoo? I don’t think so. Though their relationship has soured for reasons that aren’t common knowledge, and Google.com does not supply Yahoo with search results any longer, it certainly didn’t make Yahoo.com less popular a destination online. If anything, more webmaster like you and me, who could not afford the $200 fee for a commercial review to be listed, rush to Yahoo to see if our Google listings really were coming up number one there, too. Can’t think of any other one, can you?

Let’s discuss how this is relevant to you.

This little known advantage to having a good Alexa rating is fairly new. I was doing some research on Google, at the end of last year, to see what was the fastest, cheapest way to get my brand new site good ranking and fast inclusion in Google’s database. Using Alexa.com, I was able to discover one of the biggest secrets online that showed me how to get a visit from the Googlebot spider and included in their index in under a week. The Googlebot spider now visits the home page of my site every day, re=spidering my site when I make significant changes.

While I was at Alexa, I noticed that very quietly, without a lot of hoopla or publicity, Alexa Internet began to include a Google search right in their toolbar at the end of last year. Upon further investigation, I realized that Alexa and Google were getting quite chummy. This relationship directly led to the idea I had which uncovered a way to get Alexa and Google to help me get free, unlimited traffic for any keyword related to my site’s topic.

The idea was so simple, so cheap, and so profitable that I started to write a book about it, which I finished this past January. Everything was great, I was getting great traffic. Then I woke up one morning and checked my email, and most of my online colleagues were ticked off about something called the Florida update, which caused many small commercial websites to have their listings drop in ranking or disappear altogether.

Of course, I went to check on my site.

Not only did my ranking not drop, I had additional listings and improved exposure. One of the several factors that appeared to be the reason for my improved rankings, not just in spite of, but because of the Florida update, was my Alexa ranking. Further testing on other commercial sites of fellow small business owners confirmed this.

This experience taught me to pay a lot more attention to my Alexa rating, as well as to have a new appreciation for the ratings of all my sites.

Your Alexa rating is still relevant to you because it appears to be a factor in your page rank at Google. Generally, anything that is important to Google is important to me, because I wanted to learn how to make the site an excellent source of traffic for me. And it worked.

Working to have a rise in my Alexa rating helped me in my quest for free quality traffic as well- every increase in my Alexa rating has coincided with a rise in both the number of keywords I rank for and the likelihood that my site will appear on the first page of search results, first at Google, then with other search engines.

You’d never know that I haven’t ever submitted them my link.

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