Increase Your Alexa Rank

Free tips to help you increase your Alexa Rank for your website.

Download the Alexa toolbar and surf your own site.
Have a few friends download the Alexa Toolbar and surf your site.
Shift the focus of your site toward a more webmaster like theme.
Participate in many webmaster forums which allow you to place your site in your signature.
Write articles about webmaster topics and distribute them around the web.
Optimize pages of your site for Alexa and related phrases.
Buy ads on search engines to increase your traffic. Your Alexa traffic rankings will increase.
Write an article with tips on how to increase your Alexa rankings.
Advertise that article on the world's largest network.
Join an autosurf network which exchanges Alexa credits. <--- this actually exists and they sell off some of the credits. The problem is that those are credits. They are not real visitors. They are not what you need.
Direct Hit failed as a search engine because it based a large portion of its algorithm on web traffic. Alexa ranking is highly inaccurate and easy to manipulate.

It is the quality and quantitiy of traffic to your site and how you convert those visitors that determines whether or not you will be a success. If you need help obtaining targeted traffic read my eBook. I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

SEO Book Testimonials

These are a few of the testimonials people have left for the SEO Book.

"Your ebook - I am floored. It is awesome. I had no idea 1. you are such an incredible writer, 2 .you organize the topics in concise clear way for even the most uninitiated web design person, (like me). In my opinion it would make an awesome book, and make YOU quite famous in the web circle."

"Thanks Aaron. I always learn so much from you and your website."

"I read your book! AMAZING! I found it to be very informative and
a pleasure to read! You suggested that it might be boring...Hell, NO! Terrific."

"Thank you for putting all your hard earned knowledge together for the rest of us. I really appreciate it and shall use it as my reference manual from now on."

"Excellent! You've done some homework. A ton of good info and it was refreshing to see that your info relates to the entire search engine industry and is not heavily weighted toward Google. Everyone should take a look at this. Newbies should definitely look at this. I'll revisit this several times I'm sure."

"Just reading two pages has made it worth sending the donation. I can see that I've got a lot of reading to do....Thanks for indulging me!"

CLICK HERE If you would like to learn more about the SEO Book.

Google Update Austin, Google Update Florida

As I type this I wonder if a portion of Google's continual change is to help it garner continual press coverage...just a thought.

I wrote an article about Google Update Austin which talks about how it is somewhat similar to Google Update Florida, and some of the things you can do to improve your rankings.

Here also is a quick Google Update Austin rundown from WebProNews. Of course I am evil and do not agree with all of it, but it was interesting stuff.

Where to Submit Internet or Marketing Articles Free

Articles as links The fundamental base of the internet is not the page, but the link. A great way to accumulate links is to write articles and submit them to places interested in quality articles. Where do I submit articles in my field? Some places will accept articles automatically and some require editorial approval. If you know your industry well you should know some places that accept articles. I know within the search engine field I can submit articles to sites like Lil Engine, ISEDB, SearchGuild, and a variety of others.

Where do I submit general articles? There are also sites which take general articles such as Idea Marketers, Buzzle, Ebooks n Bytes, Article Central. The list goes on and on.

How do articles give me links? When you write articles for free you are typically given a by-line or author bio which you can link to your website.

How long should my articles be? Typically it is a good idea to review the editorial guidelines of websites before submitting articles. Most sites like articles around 600 to 900 words since the internet is a quick medium. Some sites like articles up to 1500 to 2000 words so they can split up the content to show more ads. Reading a few articles from the site should give you an idea what they are looking for.

Article resource location tips: A good tip to finding more might be to search for the name of a search engine copywriter. Karon Thackton is found on over 1,000 documents!

In addition to searching out people in your field you may want to use some of the Yahoo Announcement Groups and other article resources. Feel free to submit article resource locations in the comments :)

Submiting articles to Ezines is not something I generally do. I find that if you write an ok article and submit it to a few of these places people will just pick you up. You want to be careful about seeming spamy when trying to submit articles to ezines. A few good Ezine lists would be Ezine Universe, Topica, the Ezine Directory

Additional article resources from Jeremy Gossman are listed below.

http://goarticles.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/add_url.html
http://amazines.com
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://bpubs.com/
http://www.certificate.net/wwio/ideas.shtml
http://www.promotionworld.com/
http://promotenewz.com/

Yahoo Announcement Groups

Eventually if you do a good enough job with your articles people who syndicate your artilces will have those same articles syndicated from there! Here is another small list of Ezine directories.

<update>here are a few more sites you can submit articles to:
www.purplepages.ie
www.stickysauce.com
www.certificate.net
www.freesticky.com
www.bullmarketer.com

Here is another free XLS articles checksheet which shows over 70 sites where you can submit articles. Thanks Zoran

[update: here is more article submission locations]

</update>

The search for "Google Sells Christmas" will show you that about 40 web pages reference my second article. Before I wrote those articles my site was not popular, now it kinda is.

You can also look at content provider networks in DMOZ or the Yahoo! Directory.

Also a while ago somebody spammed me trying to promote "marketing blaster" and "search engine geek." If people publish articles that were sent to them via spam then odds are they will likely want to publish your articles too, so you may want to search for a few variations of those names such as "marketing blaster" or "marketingblaster."

Increase Alexa Rankings

1.) Download the Alexa toolbar and surf your own site.
2.) Have a few friends download the Alexa Toolbar and surf your site.
3.) Shift the focus of your site toward a more webmaster like theme.
4.) Participate in many webmaster forums which allow you to place your site in your signature.
5.) Write articles about webmaster topics and distribute them around the web.
6.) Optimize pages of your site for Alexa and related phrases.
7.) Buy ads on search engines to increase your traffic. Your Alexa traffic rankings will increase.
8.) Write an article with tips on how to increase your Alexa rankings.
9.) Advertise that article on the world's largest network.
10.) Join an autosurf network which exchanges Alexa credits. <--- this actually exists and they sell off some of the credits. The problem is that those are credits. They are not real visitors. They are not what you need.

Direct Hit failed as a search engine because it based a large portion of its algorithm on web traffic. Alexa ranking is highly inaccurate and easy to manipulate.

It is the quality and quantitiy of traffic to your site and how you convert those visitors that determines whether or not you will be a success. If you need help obtaining targeted traffic read my eBook. I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

SearchGuild & Personal Biases

Every news source you read should be questioned.

News is often provided with manipulative goals. One of the greatest advantages I have over most other SEO news site or SEO websites is my own lack of affiliation or property.

Since I do not need to make a ton of money to support myself, I usually recommend people do not buy most things. If you know what you are doing it does not cost much to do a good job at SEO. The learning process can be somewhat expensive, but after you gain the knowledge it does not go away.

The real reason for this post is that I am now the Inktomi moderator over at SearchGuild. When I provide future information about SEO I will probably be biased saying that SearchGuild is the best SEO forums.

Last year (long before I was a moderator at SearchGuild) I reviewed some of the SEO forums, and stated that SearchGuild was one of my favorites.

These are some of the things I stated I liked about SearchGuild last year in my article.

Chris and crew frequently come up with their own compelling theories on the whats and whys of search engine news
it is independent of large firms and corporate America
lots of technical know how (for example Chris made a bot to surf DMOZ listed sites to make a data resource)
has an extremely friendly feel about it
not much misinformation floating around
One thing I did not include on that list is that there is no hard sale at SearchGuild. People try to answer your questions without sounding overly witty or super self promotional.

I view SearchGuild as the open source equivalent to SEO and am glad to be affiliated with it. What do you think?

Online Branding through the Eyes of a Schmuck

Stay Cool "Don't be a Schmuck" - Rob Frankel.

Read On Just finished reading "The Revenge of Brand X," an awesome book on branding.

Right on, (or is that write on)...My article "Online Branding by a Schmuck"

Cheesy my incorrect use of bolding

Dreaming - wish I was more like SearchEngineBlog, he does the bold thing right.

Latent Semantic Indexing

(GEEK STUFF) One of the largest problems many search engines run into is that after they get to a few hundred million documents their algorithms and hardware hit a wall.

For those companies that can afford the investment to get past this point they still run into the problem that each additional resource makes their job a bit harder.

One of the major ways around this problem is to take advantage of the natural patterns in human language. Using Latent Semantic Indexing allows indexing search results based on the pairing of like words within documents.

Many complex searches may lack exact matches in the results as well. Being able to find near matches will allow search engines to provide more comprehensive results.

Its hard to get computers to understand anything human, but the process of latent semantic indexing delivers conceptual results while being entirely mathematically driven.

There are two main ways to do this, single variable decomposition and multi dimentional scaling.

Some of the steps of the single variable decomposition process are to:

create a database of all words in relevant documents
remove common stop words
stemming
remove words appearing in all results
remove words only appearing in one result
create a database of relavent keywords
weight the pages based on the frequency of keyword distribution
increasing the relevance of terms which appear in a small number of pages (as they are more likely to be on topic than words that appear in most all documents)
normalize the page to remove the pagelength as a factor
create relevancy vectors for the keywords

The single variable decomposition process is not scalable enough to work on large scale search engines though as it requires too much processor time. Multi dimentional scaling allows us to take snapshots of the topicology of different documents. "Instead of deriving the best possible projection through matrix decomposition, the MDS algorithm starts with a random arrangement of data, and then incrementally moves it around, calculating a stress function after each perturbation to see if the projection has grown more or less accurate. The algorithm keeps nudging the data points until it can no longer find lower values for the stress function."

This does not provide exact results, but only a rough approximation. When combined with other factors this approximation improves scalability and quality of search.

Good Reading on latent semantic indexing

This technology is so amazing that it may eventually help lead to a cure for cancer. Already the technology is being refined for cognitive improvements and test grading!

Top Search Keywords List

So many people ask what the top search keywords are. Generally this is an unimportant topic. What is important is the top keywords in the subject you know or are interested in. Looking at the general terms means you must compete with the entire web. Thinking of your specific segment (and those who compete with it) makes it easier to determine which keywords are important to you.

Here are some of the top keywords lists though just for the heck of it...

Yahoo Buzz index (also in UK version)
Lycos 50
Google Zeitgiest
Ask Jeeves

and of course the traditional Keyword tools
Overture Search Term Suggestion (also in UK verion)
Espotting
Wordtracker

and Hitwise offers a monthly search term report

many of these were found in a thread at Highrankings Forum

Custom 404 Error Page

Many sites do not have a custom 404 error page. When a site visitor clicks on a dead link the visitor is most likely gone. Here is a perfect article about creating the perfect 404 error page.

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