Webmasters Blog

20 Ways to Increase your Alexa Rank

subet — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 19:09:26 +0000

Here is a collection of methods you can use to boost your Alexa Rank. Most of these tips are derived from several fellow webmasters I know who claimed to have derived positive results through their experiments with the Alexa Rankings.

Some of the other tips were derived articles and sources, which I have duly referenced at the end of this post.

Do these tips work? According to some, yes they definitely do work. But do note that most of them require active effort of some sort and hence, they will work as long as long as you are consistently performing specific actions.

To increase your Alexa rank in the long run, I would highly recommended that one focus on developing quality content which attracts and maintains a large audience instead of purely focusing on artificially increasing your Alexa Rank.

Great link-worthy content will leads to an natural increase in site traffic and is an excellent way to passively increase your Alexa rank.

It is important to emphasize that you should devote most of your efforts in growing your site audience alongside integrated implementation of any of the following tips below.

Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.
Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day. According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.
Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers. Be sure to link to Alexa’s full explanation of their toolbar and tracking system so your readers know what installing the toolbar or extension entails.
Work in an Office or own a company? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers. Perhaps it will be useful to note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPs are used.
Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.
Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.
Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters usually have the toolbar installed. You’ll get webmasters to visit your website and offer useful feedback. It’s also a good way to give back to the community if you have useful articles to share with others.
Write content that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.
Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.predirectory.com . Replace predirectory.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help. There is no official proof that redirects positively benefit your Alexa Rank, so use with caution.
Post in Asian social networking websites or forums. Some webmasters have suggested that East Asian web users are big Alexa toolbar fans, judging by the presence of several Asia-based websites in the Alexa Top 500. I suggest trying this only if you have the time or capacity to do so.
Create a webmaster tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often revisit your website to gain access to the tools. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very good example.
Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop link worthy material.
Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic. Doubly useful when your ad is highly relevant to webmasters.
Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while helping you rank in the search engines.
Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget/graph at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.
Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster forums and websites. A prominent and well displayed ad will drive lots of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your rank.
Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or promote specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis. You can easily find posters for hire in Digital Point and other webmaster forums.
Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers. This might be difficult to arrange and isn’t really a viable solution for most. I’m keeping this one in because some have suggested that it does work.
Use MySpace . This is a little shady so I don’t recommended it unless you’re really interested in artificially inflating your Alexa Rank. Use visually attractive pictures or banners and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. This will be most effective if your website has content that is actually relevant to the MySpace Crowd.
Try Alexa auto-surfs. Do they work? Maybe for brand new sites. I think they are mostly suitable for new websites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so I suggest using with caution.

20 Best Photoshop Texture Tutorials

subet — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 13:54:36 +0000

There’re thousands of incredible Textures are all over the internet. So, you have vast amount of textures available, you can now add dirt, rust, floral effect, swirls, mold, oil stains in your artworks and photos to give them an aged, damaged, dreamy or any look you want.

This Showcase of high Quality Texture can be very useful to be able to make your own textures in Photoshop. You can easily customize your design and save your money.

Grungy paper

Red slate tile

Leaf texture

Create Night Sky Photoshop Tutorial

Create a Seamless, Textured, Spade Pattern Using Illustrator and Photoshop

Create Fantastic Stone Textures in Photoshop

Fabric folds

Rusty Surface

Glass

Realistic Denim Texture

How to Add Bokeh Textures to Your Photos

Design a Grunge Texture Vintage Poster in Photoshop

Create a Wooden Texture in Photoshop Optimized for 3D Rendering

Create Your Own Leather Texture Using Filters – Screencast

Create a Seamless Wood Tile in Minutes

Create a Moving Image Optical Illusion

How to Turn a Texture into a Seamlessly Tiled Background

Rock / stone

10 (almost) ironclad arguments for SEO

subet — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:26:43 +0000

SEO. What’s the deal? Why do marketing VPs, IT teams and CFO’s flee, screaming, at the mere mention of search engine optimization?

I have no answers.

However, I do have a few points – data-driven or otherwise – that I’ve used to sell SEO in the past. I’ve tested extensively, and I can tell you that these all work far better than threatening to give your client a lederhosen wedgie.

85% of people who click on a search result click on the organic search result. The only way to rank in the organic results is SEO.
100% of searchers click the first organic search result. Less than 50% click the first paid result. That’s from Vanessa Fox’s excellent book, Marketing in the Age of Google. Don’t believe me – believe her.
SEO has a cascading effect. Most of the work you do for organic SEO – content creation, site performance improvements and link building via outreach – also improves conversion, grows your overall brand and strengthens other marketing efforts.
It scales well. If you spent $5000 on organic search and then get 1,000 clicks from an organic listing, it cost you $5/click. As your rankings improve, though, and you get, say, 10,000 clicks, your cost doesn’t increase. Now your cost is $.50/click. And so on.
You’ll learn critical stuff about your customers. Improved search visibility will mean more unpaid search traffic. That will tell you more about the words, phrases and questions on customers’ minds when they look for your product or service.
Search puts you in front of the customer when they need you. Unlike traditional advertising, banners and such, search-driven marketing appears in front of the customer right when they need your services. You know that, because they’re searching for you. Hopefully you know why that’s good.
SEO is a fantastic deal. Even the most expensive SEO campaign costs a fraction of offline marketing. A typical print ad in a national magazine will cost you $40,000, minimum. A banner campaign on a major site? $10,000/month. Television? Don’t even ask. Even plain old face-to-face selling may cost more by the time you’re done missing work, buying meals, traveling around and wearing holes in your nice shoes. Try this: Take 5% of your offline marketing budget and invest it in a smart SEO person. See what it gets you.
Paid search costs increase over time. There are very few topics for which pay-per-click (PPC) marketing has become cheaper. “Bid inflation” means that most companies have seen a rapid rise in their PPC expenses. SEO only gets more expensive if your consultant increases their price, or your in-house team asks for raises.
SEO is a lasting asset. Assuming you stick to SEO techniques with long-term viability, your search engine optimization work will help you for months or years. Every improvement you make, every page you add to your site, every link you earn will stick around, boosting later efforts. Think of SEO as a marketing savings account: Your work will generate compound interest.
The upstart can win. SEO is a small business’ best chance to beat out incumbents. SEO requires a degree of agility that big companies often can’t manage.

There you have it. I pull out 3-4 of the above arguments in almost any sales pitch to a new or current client. They work. Lederhosen threats do not.

10 Internet Marketing Strategies for Building Brand Awareness

subet — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:14:49 +0000

When deciding to start a website and make money online the first thing people worry about is receiving targeted website traffic. If you search Google for ‘muffin pans’ the only difference between the first site listed and the site listed on page 2,000,135 is that one website site owner has put more attention into brand awareness and internet marketing.

So before I begin, lets make sure we have a clear understanding of what brand awareness means.

Brand awareness is a marketing concept that measures consumers’ knowledge of a brand’s existence. At the aggregate (brand) level, it refers to the proportion of consumers who know of the brand.

This basically means, marketing your product so that it’s recognizable everywhere, like Coke, Mc Donald’s and Walmart. Take into consideration that these multi-million dollar companies (maybe even billions) spend a fortune on advertising every year to maintain their brand awareness in order to build loyalty for their customers. But for the everyday person starting an internet business this may seem almost impossible.

Brand recognition takes time and effort, so I have provided a few internet marketing ideas which will help you create a successful brand.

1. Sell Yourself First. Brand building can be as simple as being yourself. I can’t count how many times I have been undecided about purchasing a product, the final decision was between two very similar choices and I chose a the product based on a the fact I liked one company (or business owner) more than the other. Building a brand isn’t just about the product you’re selling, but it’s about brand perception. Do people like you? Do people speak highly of your business? Because if they do, they are more likely to purchase from you and tell their friends.

2. Use the Product Yourself. As a small business without much start-up capital brand development can start by simply using your own product! You would be amazed at how simple this marketing concept is, but sometimes overlooked. Every small business should have an online marketing strategy which includes multimedia (videos, images, audio, etc.) of the owner using their products. Allowing a potential customers to see the owner stand behind their products’ quality and is passionate about it’s value will convert into potential sales.

3. Follow Up and Stay Accessible. Brand advertising and development is on going. Most people rarely purchase a product the first time they see it online. Potential customers will bookmark the product, come back, get outside opinions and then make a decision after careful consideration. Your direct marketing strategy should always include following up with a prospect, since it usually takes 6-7 exposures to a product before someone actually buys something. Always take every opportunity to answer questions, respond to emails and phone calls because this can mean the difference between making the sale or not.

4. Article Marketing. Writing articles will help you build credibility and brand visibility on the internet. This marketing strategy is easy, time consuming, but extremely effective in branding your website. By writing short 400-500 hundred word articles and submitting them to the top article directories, your search engine rankings will increase and people will begin to find your site in popular search engines more easily.

5. Smaller Niche Markets. Brand awareness isn’t just for larger companies who can afford to hire top dollar marketing consultants. There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses thriving online by narrowing down their niche to be more specific. So instead of concentrating on building a brand around ‘poodle grooming supplies’, it might be more profitable to concentrate on ‘pink poodle dye and nail polish’. Successful brands realize the importance of starting small while building brand loyalty.

6. Social Media. Since the emergence of social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, branding experts have come to realize that these free social outlets can greatly contribute to brand development and potential sales. Social media marketing strategies can include building a following for your customers to stay informed, offering coupons and incentives and providing direct one-on-one contact with your customers. Social media is critical to building brand awareness for small businesses with limited funds and brand experience.

7. Make a Bang with Multimedia. Every day start-ups are looking for the biggest bang for their buck and the best way to create a buzz around your brand is with multimedia – specifically video. One of the biggest explosions of internet marketing is online video. Once a company starts creating real videos, with real people along with unique content, they become more accessible to the consumer. Because know matter how many brand development techniques you implement, the reality is, people want to deal with real people. Not companies.

8. Build an Email List. List building is one of the most important online marketing strategies available today. An email list is when you offer visitors to your website something free (coupons, discounts or exclusive content) by having them sign up for your weekly newsletter or mailing list. If you have an email list, then you will essentially have direct marketing access to people who are interested in your products. So when there are new additions to the website or a special insider sale, you can reach your customers directly and potentially make more sales.

9. Send Regular Emails. Brand creation doesn’t end once you have captured a long list of names and emails. Brand loyalty occurs whens when you keep in constant contact with your subscribers. As an entrepreneur, you should be sending emails regularly, around once a week (you don’t want to be annoying). These emails should include additional information about your products, news and articles during the week they may have missed.

10. Research Keywords. Keywords are the specific words people input into Google (yes, or BING or Yahoo) search in order to locate information on the internet. For example, if I am looking for Karate classes in Richmond Virginia, I may go to Google and type in ‘Karate class Richmond Virginia’ and the most popular options will show up first. If you are the owner of a karate class in Richmond Virgina you would make sure you use the keywords ‘Karate’, ‘class’, ‘Richmond’ and ‘Virginia’ were appear on your website (within the page title and body text) and perhaps even in some article titles for article marketing.

The brand building process is on-going. Even after you have implemented these internet marketing strategies, there is always more that can be done. Becoming successful online is a lot easier that most people think. All you need is time, energy and knowledge while keeping people’s best interests in mind.

Why You Need an Internet Marketing Strategy

subet — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:03:00 +0000

An internet marketing strategy refers to the simple through to complex methods which help to improve the various online objectives of a business. By adopting tactical internet marketing strategies in an orderly manner, a particular website will have a much better chance of succeeding in the long term.

There are many internet marketing strategies available on the internet, and all websites make use of these strategies in order to achieve popularity in internet, in terms of traffic and direct sales or lead generation. Some marketing strategies are better than others however, and this is what leads to an online competitive advantage.

A good strategy will first focus on all the marketing goals required for a business organisation, mixing brand awareness targets with high search engine rankings, there are many variables in this initial stage.

The key principles of an internet marketing strategy begin with the creation of well detailed content as well as user-friendly navigation for the website. Customers should be able to get all the information they need, and at the same time this has to be adapted for search robots, and also optimised for conversions.

Internet marketing strategy models also involve creating targeted off-page (external from the target website domain) exposure of services or products (or both). There should be use of press releases, blogging, pay per click (if required), directory submissions etc.

Internet marketing strategies involve the use of effective internet marketing tools which will add a boost to the promotion of the URL. A high degree of search engine optimisation is also a factor of a successful internet marketing strategy which is used by the majority of e-commerce operations.

8 Advertising techniques that work

subet — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:09:50 +0000

Whether your business is new, or it’s 10 years old, you’re always going to want to find new customers. We all know that word of mouth is going to be your best bet when it comes down to retaining previous, as well as new clients.

Now, you’re probably wondering what kind of advertising methods work in today’s technological era. I wanted to share 8 ways on how I advertise and how they have worked for me. I run a few online properties and have found that these techniques have always drawn in new business for me. In fact, sometimes, it’s too much! Do a good enough job and you won’t have to worry about finding new customers.

1 Get on Google Maps: People love to search for businesses on the web. With Google maps, you can verify your company. I would advise that you do so. Let’s say that you have a deck building company and someone searches for Atlanta, GA decks. You’re going to want to be there, right? The best thing is that it’s free!

2 Use PPC: PPC (pay per click) is one of my favorites when it comes down to advertising. I can target exactly who I want and the only time that I have to pay is when they click on my ads. All major search engines such as Google, Bing, as well as smaller ones such as Ask offer these services.

3 Brand yourself on Facebook: I love Facebook when it comes down to advertising. Not only does it work great for branding, it can draw a lot of awareness to your company. Create a fan page and either advertise that, or send them directly to your website. The coolest thing about this is that you can target specific audiences.

4 Craigslist: Be careful with Craigslist because you don’t want to spam here, but put up an ad every 3 weeks or so. Don’t make it look like spam and just explain what you can do. Always make sure that the title is catchy enough for people to click on it. Add pictures as well, because people love pictures!

5 Contribute on forums: No matter what industry you’re in, you’re going to find that there are message boards that cater to you. Join these forums and make it a habit to contribute at least 1 time a day. Don’t go there for the sole purpose of advertising, but rather, give information. Since many forum owners allow you to put a signature at the end of your post, take advantage of this!

6 Write for other bloggers: Find other bloggers that are in your niche. Let’s again say that you do decks. Well, it’s important that you have some sort of blog to keep your site fresh. Find other bloggers and write a little piece for them. In return, ask for a link back to your site.

7 Use old media ways: Google Adwords has a cool feature where you can advertise on TV, the radio, and more. All of these advertising platforms are still around. You will want to consider them, if your budget is big enough.

8 Send out press releases: Let’s say that you’re launching something cool and unique. Spend a few hundred on a good press release. This is going to be blasted out to many media outlets. If they like your story, you can get interviews galore!

Advertising, as well as branding takes some work. If you do a good job, people are going to keep coming back. This is why you’re always going to want to consider quality as well. Test out a few of these 8 tips and see how they work for you!