Quicklinks, also called sitelinks, are very useful to search users because it gives them an idea of the pages they can find on a website and immediately click on the page they want to go to instead of having to navigate from the main or landing page. Below is an image of how SmartPageRank’s quicklinks appear on Google’s SERPs.

Quicklinks are also very useful for websites as well because it is better for us to have users land on the page they want to go to because of the following reasons:

less bounce rates – A lot of people, especially first time visitors, do not even take time to navigate through links and immediately close the tab/window when they find themselves in a page they don’t want to be in.
increases user satisfaction – Since they get to what they want more quickly it will increase their overall happiness of the site, thus increasing the chance of having them comeback.
data for popular landing pages – If people keep on clicking on a certain link then it will give us a better idea on which pages will be best to use as a landing page since they are, after all, what people seem to be most interested in.

So how does search engines decide whether a site should have quick links or not. And how do they decide what pages should fall under those links? Furthermore, how do they choose the anchor text that should go with each link?

On my next post I will be discussing the answers to the questions above.

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Bloggers love comments – receiving them, that is. In fact, I would go as far as to say that most bloggers aim to get as many comments as they can possibly get. However, the opposite is not always the case. What I mean is that even if everyone wants to receive comments, not everyone likes taking the time to leave their comments in other people’s blogs.

What if I told you that you can actually use commenting to create links to your own blog or web site and, hopefully, increase your PR. This can be done by leaving your comments on other blogs and indicating your URL in the appropriate field. However, you have to note that this will not ALWAYS generate links to your blog. How so?

There are different ways by which blog owners manage comments. The Page Rank Guide summarizes them neatly.

1. Blogs that use comment moderation and “rel=nofollow”
2. Blogs that use no comment moderation and “rel=nofollow”
3. Blogs that use comment moderation and links follow
4. Blogs that use no comment moderation and links follow

The first two methods will not do much good for you in terms of links. This is because the “no follow” command means that even if you place your URL in your comment, the link will not point to your site. So before you go on a commenting frenzy, remember that the blog you should comment on has be a “do follow” one.

More so, make sure that you will not end up being a spam commenter. Make sure your comments make sense and are relevant to the topic of the post.

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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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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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The Smart PageRank community is great. Luca, one of our Smart PageRank users, recently submitted 2 awesome Firefox plugins based on Smart PageRank and Backlinks Analyzer.

These plugins are saving me a lot of time because you can use Smart PageRank or Banklinks Analyzer right on the Firefox browser.  You just enter the URL in the Firefox search box on the top right.

No more typing the Smart PageRank URL or searching through your bookmarks.  It’s right there on your browser.

Check out these screenshots.

Thanks, Luca. Awesome job.

Get the plugins!

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I am thrilled that so many of you truly find Smart PageRank useful for your SEO work. Over the past week, the daily Alexa has been under 10k! While this is certainly a feat that excites me, it has also posed some interesting challenges.

First of all, Google and Yahoo are giving me fits! When I make a call to Google (and sometimes Yahoo), my code often received the following error:

“We’re sorry…
… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google. “

I am doing my best to remedy the situation so that you always receive the most useful information possible. If any of you have some ideas, please feel free to post a comment to help me out!

As the title of this post suggests, I have an update almost ready for the PageRank Backlink checker. This update will add the ability to know if there is a nofollow tag in the site that links to you. You can also see the anchor text that they use. This should be ready for live rollout in the next couple of days.

As always, feel free to give me new ideas or suggestions on ways that I can improve Smart PageRank. Many of you have sent me emails and I sincerely appreciate them. Many of your suggestions have greatly improved Smart PageRank.

As always, happy SEOing!

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