We’ve been talking about how to increase your Alexa Rank in the past two posts.  What I didn’t realize is that some people do not understand all the hullabaloo about Alexa.  My apologies to those who feel this way and thanks to Adam, one of our readers, who brought this to my attention.

So, indeed, why should we bother with Alexa Rank?  Is it really important?  More so, what is Alexa Rank?

Simply put, Alexa collects data regarding the traffic that goes through your site or your blog.  This was explained in the previous post where I quoted the text from Alexa itself.  So it is much like a system which measures your site’s popularity.

So how is this important?  Ask yourself, why are you maintaining your blog or your web site?  If it is fully for your own pleasure and no one else’s, then Alexa Rank may not be important to you at all.  However, if you want to let the rest of the world know about your site, then Alexa could work for you.

Another important thing is that Alexa is being used by a lot of advertisers and publishers.  If you are working on monetizing your blog, then you definitely need these people.  And how do you attract them?  By getting a high ranking in the eyes of the people at Alexa. Of course, there are other factors that could come into play, it is not always that simple.  However, this is the basic premise behind the importance of Alexa.

I hope that helps.

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In the last post, we talked about installing the Alexa Toolbar as the first step to increasing your Alexa Rank. Let us look at some more things that you can do to achieve this goal.

Alexa Rank Widget
This widget is something different from your Alexa Toolbar. It is supposed to add to your visitor count even if the visitor does not click on your toolbar. According to stats, the widget receives a fair amount of clicks from visitors in general.

Set your default homepage to your web site
This is particularly effective for those who are promoting a business or company web site or blog. What you can do is install the Alexa Toolbar and widget in all your computers in the office and then set the default homepage to your own web site or company blog. Of course, this can only be done for the official site – forget about doing this for your personal site or blog, you’ll only get in trouble!

Alexa redirects
Do you like leaving comments and posting in forums? Use this to your Alexa advantage by making use of Alexa redirects. It works this way – instead of using a direct link to your site or your blog, use a redirect: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.yourdomain.com. People who click on your link will then be counted – hopefully increasing your Alexa rank. This last one is not a surefire way of increasing Alexa rankings but it just might help.

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I am quite sure that if you place any value on the concept of Alexa rank, then you would answer a resounding yes to that question. For the benefit of those who are not very familiar with Alexa rank, here are some salient points from the Alexa web site:

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on a value derived from these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago.

Now that you have that basic info, what should you do to increase your Alexa rank? Here are a few things that would come in handy.

Alexa Toolbar
I talked about this sometime ago and the question was whether or not you really need the Alexa Toolbar. Well, if you are going to work on increasing your rank, then you might as well install the toolbar. It is going to make monitoring much easier for you.

(to be continued)

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Some people do not do well when it comes to long-term planning.  I have to admit that I can be one of them.  There are times when I can barely plan my activities a month from now.  Then again, I do know the importance of planning for the long run and I do my best to do that.

When it comes to SEO, long-term thinking may be the best way to go.  Anyone who has had any experience with SEO and all its intricacies would know that sometimes, short cuts just don’t work.  Oh, they may get short-term results, that’s for sure.  But in the long run, what a web site owner wants is to build a lasting impression online.

Think about it, why are you maintaining that web site or blog?  Do you merely want to reap the benefits within a few months time?  Perhaps for some specific purposes, that would be enough.  But for many, the idea is to keep the blog or web site up and running for as long as it could.  More than that, you would want to keep that site popular and alive for years to come.

The only really clean way to do this would be to plan for the future.  This is where white hat SEO has the most advantage over black hat and gray hat SEO, I believe.  The latter two activities may bring about quicker results but in the long run, they may also be the downfall of the site.  Believe it or not, Google would probably catch up on these shady activities and bring the hammer down on the site.  What happens to the long-term growth then?

If I were you, I’d look into long-term results before deciding on any SEO practice.

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In the previous post, we took a look at gray hat SEO techniques in general. This time, let us take a closer look at these practices and be a bit more specific.

Cloaking
Cloaking is the practice wherein the web site owner provides information to the search engines which is different from what the site actually contains. Obviously, this is a practice that reeks of deception. However, there are certain cases when this practice can be deemed acceptable. For example, if the web site has content that is available only to members then it could be acceptable. Then again, this practice can very well be abused. That is the main reason cloaking is considered gray hat SEO.

Paid links
We all know how important links are for SEO. That is why it is quite understandable that the practice of buying links can become questionable. Purchasing links for advertising purposes is fine. However, if you purchase links solely because you want in link-popularity, then it could be considered shady. In fact, the suggestion is that you work on links to increase your traffic and just consider the increase in link-popularity as icing on top of the cake.

Duplicate content
Duplicate content can be considered legitimate in certain cases but rarely. For example, indexing and abstracting web sites may have duplicate content. In most cases, though, duplicate content is considered unacceptable.

Bottom line: when in doubt, be on the safe side.

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I’ve heard about black hat SEO and white hat SEO but have you ever encountered gray hat SEO? If you think about it, it does not really take a rocket scientist to figure out what gray hat SEO is all about. As in the real world, things are not always black and white, there will always be gray areas – those activities and ideologies which do not clearly conform to either extreme.

When it comes to SEO, the gray areas abound. However, in my point of view – as well as many others, I believe – gray hat SEO leans towards black hat more than white hat. This is because gray hat SEO simply employs techniques that are quite akin to spamming but not quite labeled by Google (and other authorities in the field) as black hat – as of yet.

Practicing gray hat SEO is much like trying to fly below the radar, trying not to get the attention of those who are in the lookout. However, the fact that you feel that you need to fly under the radar means that you are engaging in illegitimate activities or, at the very least, activities bordering on the illegitimate.

Why would anyone want to engage in gray hat SEO? If you are asking that question, then you may very well ask, “Why would anyone want to engage in black hat SEO?” The bottom line is the same – they want to achieve good search engine rankings the “easy” way. Somewhere along the road though, Google will catch up on these practitioners and penalize them – then, regret will be felt.

In the next post, let’s look at some gray hat SEO tactics.

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So you’re convinced that outsourcing your SEO activities is the best course to take for your business. I think that this is a good decision – especially if you really don’t have the expertise to carry out your SEO. Yet you also have to realize that not all SEO services are the same. There are countless companies that offer their services with regard to SEO out there, how do you decide on which one to deal with? Here are some questions that you may want to ask potential SEO service providers.

What is your track record?
This actually applies to most any service that you outsource. You can begin with the background of the company and the businesses they have worked for. For SEO companies, in particular, they should be able to show several web sites that they have serviced and the results they got. Four to six web sites at the tops of SERPs should be good enough.

Can you provide customer testimonials?
Ask if they can provide you with the contact information of some of their customers and if you can get in touch with the directly so that you can ask them specific questions about the SEO company’s services. If they have nothing to hide, then they should be able to do this. On your part, ensure that the customers are real and not fabricated.

What is their proposed strategy?
Even if you are not well-versed in SEO, you should at least have an idea as to what path the SEO company is going to take to achieve your goals. You may even give your own input as you see fit. This is also a good way to determine that their service is legitimate.

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Anyone who has a blog or a web site knows about the hullabaloo associated with page rank. Indeed, if you judge things by the fuss that everyone is making about page rank, you can say that it is one of the biggest things that concerns web site and blog owners. So why is page rank important? Does it really have any advantages at all? If so, what are these advantages? Here are a few that I could think of.

The higher your page rank, the higher you will be in the SERPs

Who wouldn’t want to be on the first page of a search query on Google? I have some other blogs that I write for and one time, I did a search using particular keywords for the blog. I could not even begin to describe the feeling that washed over me when I saw that the blog was in the first page of the results! More than the feeling, however, being on the first page – or first few pages – makes for more visibility, which in turn, could increase the traffic to your site.

The higher your page rank, the more trust people will put in your site

Though this point may be debatable, it is true that if people see that your page rank is high, they will think better of your site. For some reason, having a high page rank gives out the idea that your site is reliable and of high quality. Though that may not always be the case, it is reasonable to think so, don’t you agree?

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Calm down – I know your heart is probably pounding like crazy right now, especially if you are working on your own blog which focuses on SEO. I felt the same way when I started reading Lee Odden’s post about Wordpress labeling SEO blogs as “banned .” Reading on, however, it was made clear that Wordpress is pertaining to blogs which are search engine optimized in a “bad” way and not blogs which talk about SEO – much like this blog.

These are the blogs which Wordpress specifically bans:

• Scraper blogs: Blogs that take content from other blogs and re-publish it without permission (this is sometimes called scraping). If a blog contains all or mostly stolen and unoriginal content, it’s gone!
• SEO blogs: Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them highly. WordPress.com is not meant for this type of activity.
• Affiliate marketing blogs: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs and get-rich-quick schemes (”Make six figures from home!!”, “20 easy steps to top profits!!”, etc). To be clear, examples like people writing original book or movie reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category.
• Warez blogs: Blogs that promote pirated copies of ebooks, software packages, music, movies, games, etc.

I suppose that Wordpress could word the classification tags in a more specific way so as to avoid confusion and reactions like I felt when I first read the post. Still, we should not overreact as we know very well that blogs such as this one do not fall under any of these categories.

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In the previous post, we took a look at why you should not outsource your SEO.  In this post, let us give the other side a look.  At the end of this post, I leave it up to you to decide which option is best for your company.

Why has outsourcing become popular?  I think the main reason lies in the difference between core activities and non-core activities.  In fact, outsourcing arose from this difference.  The whole idea of outsourcing is to delegate non-core activities to another entity so that you can focus on your core activities.  This frees up your time to focus on the most essential elements of your business.

Another point is that if you are not really that knowledgeable when it comes to SEO practices. It is true that the basic principles of SEO have not changed all that much.  Of course, there have been developments but anyone can learn the basics of SEO.  However, we cannot deny the fact that there are SEO experts who can do the job much better than you can.  If you do not feel comfortable working on your own SEO, then it is best to outsource it as you will get better results.

Last, but not the least, there are many SEO experts offshore.  They can bring about good results for much lower costs than if you work on SEO in-house.  Not only will you be freeing up those employees of yours for more essential tasks, but you will be saving up on expenses as well.

So what’s it going to be?

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