Recent years have seen a tremendous boost to online presence . The site may be about a company's assets, a business outlet, an information related source or just a personal profile. Everyone that's entering the market has to have an online presence. With such a huge competition it all comes down to what your site's ranking is on the web?
It's very important to keep a check on the performance of your site.
Knowing your position on the Internet can help you reach a wider
audience or simply understand how you can improve it further.
Alexa is a major source when it comes to checking your rank on the
web. Side by side we also have our friend Google and its page ranks.
Both operate on different levels and are consulted by almost everyone.
However, the question is that which of the two is the better one and
should be considered the Holy Grail?
Alexa is only interested in traffic. It takes into account the amount
of traffic movement on your website and gives your site a rank
according to it. Where many boast their Alexa rankings, it should be
noted that Alexa cannot be trusted and I'll tell you why.
Let's take an example of a website that has over 20 authors. One of
the authors posts a topic containing over 50 images. The rest of the
authors, 19 of them, check the post out and open each image. Within a
minute the site just generated 950 views. Alexa will grant the site a
good rank for such a large traffic within a short time but as you've
seen, the traffic is of no use.
In short, the traffic and hence Alexa's ranking can be manipulated
easily by one person alone. The owner can visit his pages frequently and
improve his ranking just by that. Not to mention that there are other
ways too through which you can boost Alexa's ranking but I won't be
discussing them here.
Google page ranks work very differently. Instead of traffic, they
rank your site based on the number of back links. Google ranks each site
with a page rank of NA - 10 with 10 being the best and NA being the
worst. The more back links your site generates, the higher page rank
you'll have and that will result in more chances of your site popping up
on the first page of search results.
However, it's important to note that page rankings is only part of
how Google determines which site should come up first on search results.
This topic is shrouded in mystery for no one really knows how Google
operates. There are a number of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
techniques but Google hasn't really released & how their algorithm
works.
An example for how Google page ranks work would be a topic I posted
on my blog recently. My review of a recently released game title was
initially showing on the 3rd page of Google searches. Overnight my topic
generated a good amount of back links and now it's on the first page of
Google search results.
So now that you know how both Google and Alexa operate over the top,
you'll be asking which one I should choose? My answer to you would be
neither. If your site is new then it doesn't really matter what rank
Alexa is showing or what page rank Google is giving you. In the start
it's best to concentrate solely on your content. Read about SEO on the
web and design your site accordingly to be SEO friendly. Follow the
basic SEO principles to make your posts friendly for Google crawlers and
never stop adding content to your site.
Here let me clear a common misconception regarding websites and blog
sites. A blog site provides a valuable source of information on certain
topics. You have your IT blogs where the author posts each day about
news happening in the industry, there are game blogs with up to date
reviews and previews, designing blogs with tutorials, health blogs with
tips and so on. A website however, when placed against a blog tends to
look bland. It will not provide readers with that much material and off
course in the end will not be traffic friendly. A site with no traffic
will generate you no money.
So a main point to consider is that blogs are better situated to
getting a higher ranking than conventional sites. A site containing
products for sale would get lesser attention than a blog with news on
the products, what future products to expect, the pros and cons and so
on.
Work on your site for six months. If you have followed the basic SEO
procedures then you'll automatically start to see good Google page and
Alexa rankings. But that's only half of the journey. Just coming on
Google's search results or getting a high Alexa ranking isn't where you
stop. From then on you have to be creative. Think of more ways to
attract potential readers or clients. Use information from both Alexa
and Google to help you narrow down your target market.
Remember that there is no single tool to help you with your rankings. Use whatever you find, be creative and never stop posting.