ALEXA WEIGHS IN...
For those who are unaware of Alexa, it offers an interesting tool
to webmasters. The service is designed to value websites based on
the number of people who visit those sites and the activities of
those people while they are on a site.
Keep in mind that their results are skewed to the activities of
those who use the Alexa toolbar. If your website is Business-to-
Business oriented, then the results may be useful to your needs.
If your site is Business-to-Customer oriented, then the Alexa
results are far from accurate in documenting the importance of
your website.
The reason why the Alexa results are skewed to the Business-to-
Business market is because most people using the Alexa toolbar
are involved in Business-to-Business activities, either as an
user or provider of B2B services.
On May 24, 2005, Alexa's ranking of the Top Ten English Language
websites were as follows:
* http://www.yahoo.com
* http://www.msn.com
* http://www.google.com
* http://www.passport.net
* http://www.ebay.com
* http://www.microsoft.com
* http://www.amazon.com
* http://www.fastclick.com
* http://www.google.co.uk
* http://www.aol.com
( This info came from: http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500 )
WHAT EIGHT OF THE TOP TEN WEBSITES ALL HAVE IN COMMON
Sure, five of these top ten sites are search oriented sites, but
that is not the answer.
Passport.net is owned by Microsoft and must be accessed when
someone is logging into the msn.com network. Fastclick.com is a
site that helps advertisers buy advertising across a huge network
of sites. These two sites do not fit the profile.
The one thing that eight of our top ten sites have in common is
that they are content driven destinations and they add new,
original, and exclusive content on a daily basis.
BLOGS ARE THE GREAT EQUALIZER
Blogs are the great equalizer because they simplify the task of
adding content to a website on a daily or weekly basis. They make
it simple for the average joe to add content to their site on a
daily basis with just a few clicks of the mouse.
What is more, the spider search engine companies recognize this
and make it a point to spider the blog networks on a regular
basis, sometimes a daily basis.
It may take a spider search engine up to three months to spider
your site if you go directly to their submission page to add your
domain to their database. On the other hand, with a blog, you can
put a story about your domain on a blog with a link to your
domain, and your website can generally get crawled within a week
or so of putting your link on the blog.
BLOGS REQUIRE A COMMITMENT ON YOUR PART
Daily additions to your blog should be your goal. If you do not
have time to do daily additions, you should at worst do a weekly
addition to your blog.
Just like in the real world of websites, if you don't update your
blog on a regular basis, the spiders will save their time and
resources by not spidering your blog on a daily basis. If however
you do update on a daily or near daily basis, then the spiders
will visit your blog with the same fervor you bring to your blog.
Additionally, it sometimes seems like the search engine spiders
are giving some addition weight to the results culled from the
blogs. The point in this additional weighting is that blogs are
filled with personal comments and recommendations rather than
sales pitches.
BLOGS ARE EASY TO SET UP, EVEN FOR THE RANK AMATEUR
There are in fact several blog programs available that you can
either load into your own domain or that you can use from a
third-party, remotely-hosted server.
To see a list of the blogging programs that are available, check
out this link:
http://keywordtext.com/redir/blog-list
My personal favorite is http://www.blogger.com which happens to
be owned by Google. Blogger allows you the ability to use the
software from their servers or to integrate the blog software
into your own site with very little effort on your part.
I was able to integrate their software into our own site and to
customize the display of the blogger to fit our domain's format,
and I was able to pull that task off in just about 30 minutes ---
with most of that time dedicated to the custom display of our
blog.
Add to the simplicity of setting up the blog, the fact that since
blogger.com is owned by Google.com, they will always be very keen
to spider our blog on a regular basis.
From launch of our website, to the spidering of our site by
Google took just about ten days. Within three days of the launch
of our site, Google had spidered the main page of our site.
Within ten days, Google had already spidered the whole of our
website.
Compared to other websites we have launched, this was the fastest
turn-around time from new release to traffic from the search
engines. We believe the difference in this case study had to do
more with the addition of the blog on the day of our launch than
anything else we may have done to promote our domain.
EQUALIZE YOUR SITE WITH THE SITES OF THE BIG BOYS
The big sites on the internet got to be that way because they
consistently add new, original, and exclusive content to their
websites.
While you and I may never have as much content on our sites as
the big boys do, we can benefit from the lessons they teach to
us.
Now that you have also learned this important lesson, it is time
to put this knowledge into action. Make it part of your daily or
weekly schedule to add fresh, interesting content to your
website. Your banker will thank you.
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