These 20 tips cover everything from the basics to some of the same SEO techniques we use daily to dominate competitive verticals. We hope you enjoy the list and feel free to add a few of your own in the comments section or pass them along to others so they can enjoy them as well.

1. Canonical Issues - check canonical issues to make sure there is a preferred default page or domain preference (http:// or www).
   • No reason to have 3 variations of a home page .html, .php and default.htm, depending on your programming platform, server settings (Unix or Windows) as well as if you are using static pages or a content management system you will need to consolidate your website to either http:// or http://www to avoid splitting your site into less potent slivers.
2. Indexation and Crawl Frequency – See how many pages are crawled in a site to determine crawl frequency.
   • If you have a home page that is crawled regularly and your internal pages are ignored, then this is often a result of lack of internal or external links.
   • You can implement sitemaps on a folder by folder basis, then link from the footer in a site template to a maser sitemap page (where all the mini sitemaps are linked to) to increase indexation. This way the link from the footer consolidates the ranking factor to one page and THAT page feeds the various site maps equivocally (through a tiered drip-down site architecture effect).
3. Orphaned Pages and Dead Ends – check for orphaned pages to determine if pages are linked sufficiently to ensure crawling.
   • If you have a page or sub folder in a website that is only linked to from a few pages, then you cannot possibly expect that page to rank well in search engines. If you yourself will not “endorse” a page by linking to it properly (contextually from keywords in the body copy) or from the primary or secondary navigation, then you cannot possibly expect search engines to pay that page with any more credence than yourself.
   • Also be weary of PDF files (which can rank on their own and sponge link flow from your website). Make sure PDF files have absolute links (use the complete URL) back to your site, so they do not pool ranking factor and trap it where the rest of your site cannot benefit.
4. Dynamic URL’s – If pages are dynamically created, try to remove or rewrite as many parameters in the URL as possible or use URL / Mod rewrite.
   • Any time you have session data or query string parameters in a URL, you are decreasing the possibility of indexation. Particularly if there are conventions such as ?PID=23D-55.aspx trailing along, when a SEO friendly naming convention could have taken its place with a bit of programming. You can rewrite entire segments, sub folders, categories, etc. without losing functionality or compromising SEO value.
5. Naming Conventions – Use proper naming conventions (subject or keyword first, then plural variation, modifier, then tag line).
   • Here is a more useful post about how to use meta titles, descriptions and naming conventions, but the gist is simple. Create a hierarchy based on a relevant platform of topically reinforcing semantics using keyword clusters and related synonyms to toggle relevance from what search engines deem as the co-occurrence matrix.
6. Manage Outbound Links - Try to cap outbound links per page to fewer than 50 links for larger pages (10 for top level pages that need more ranking factor).
   • The more links that leave a page, the less ranking factor the elements on that page have as equity. The only instance when this is not a concern is if the page itself is augmented from other strong internal pages or have strong inbound links from other sites to offset the hemorrhaging effects of excessive links leaving a page.
7. Footer / Site wide Links - Use footer links sparingly by tactfully to tie site segments together.
   • Footer links still work (using 5-10 keyword-rich text links at the bottom of a page), but that can also diffuse the intent of pages that do not have enough content to distinguish themselves from other pages. If a page in a site does not have more than 300 unique words on that page, it can lose relevance as the navigation and other code structures collapse and all interject their shingles to offset or diffuse the pages unique purpose and optimal continuity.
   • For example if you have a page that is only a paragraph or two and you expect that page to rank for specific keywords, your navigation alone may trump the relevance for that page. Check your cached pages in text view to see how search engines view your code and your content without style sheets or java script .
   • Footer links can help bring balance to pages with less content, but use them on pages with enough content to weather their contribution.
8. Broken Links – Check for broken links which could be hemorrhaging link flow and weakening a site from within.
   • Broken links irritate search engine spiders, and when they cannot connect the dots, your sites rankings suffer. If you are using WordPress our plugin SEO Ultimate features a 404 monitor that sweeps the site for broken links which you can find and eliminate.
9. Alt Attributes in Images – Use alt attributes on images to preserve content integrity while providing internal links for ranking factor.
   • Using the alt attribute in images allows you to reinforce topical relevance with the on page text based content to improve a pages relevance score.
10. Anchor Text Optimization – Use pertinent anchor text and do not waste link equity from excessively linking to non reciprocating pages within a site.
    • Employing anchor text optimization means using relevant keywords to link to relevant pages within a site. Do this enough and before you know it you are virtual theming (which means creating a secondary navigation contextually through keyword co-occurrence).
    • This alone can distinguish your site from competitors as each granular layer consolidates ranking factor for a website. This alone is one reason why Wikipedia dominates search results, due to virtual theming.
11. Flattening Site Architecture – Keep site architecture as flat as possible or use breadcrumbs to aid in information architecture and crawling.
    • Avoid using sub folders excessively within a website domain.com/categories/products/color/page.html vs. flattening the url and site by using more descriptive naming conventions for a page domain.com/electronics-black-sports-watch.html
    • The closer the more competitive keyword landing pages are to the root folder, the easier it will be for them to gain additional ranking factor, page rank and page strength to express the content on that page.
12. Content Volume - Ensure you have enough content to topple a competitive keyword.
    • Trying to rank for a keyword with 5 million competing pages with a handful of content is an exercise in futility. You will need topical relevance which means articles, posts or pages all internally linked and consolidated to create the proper on page signals for that keyword.
    • For every keywords there is a relevance threshold and tipping point, you will need to offset competitors by having more on page affluence as well as off page peer review (links from other authorities). However, in either case, content is a requirement.
13. Contextual Links – Link contextually within related document to select preferred landing pages through virtual theming.
    • The premise is simple, if you are on a page about engines, and have a keyword pistons appear, then link the keyword pistons to the piston page. Do this for every keyword (only once per page if it appears more than that) and you have just added a virtual theme to your keywords. This means that each page can now work together collectively to support the parent theme (which is the main/root keyword itself).
14. Meta Tags - For larger sites, exclude meta descriptions but for smaller sites, use the meta data as an extra title or place for alternative keywords.
    • Always use a succinct and relevant title, but if you have multiple pages on a topic, then let search engines decide which keywords are more prominent and relevant by excluding the meta description / snippet from the page.
    • Also make sure that if you are using a content management system that your pages do not all share a common, generic meta title or description as a default. This is the fastest way to shoot down rankings in a site (lack of character).
15. Deep Links – Get at least 5-10 inbound links to each page via deep links from other sites in order to create buoyancy.
    • A page without links either from the site itself, or other sites is a page that has little value to readers or search engines. Popularity matters and for the millions of site owners who may or may not be aware of this simple fact, you MUST have deep links to a page if you want that page to exceed standard normalization.
    • A website replete with deep links (links to other pages other than the homepage) will start to have those individual pages rank and appear for multiple keywords. Not only does this create a more robust user experience, but the dependency for your rankings is not tied to an off topic or generic page like the homepage.
    • The take away here is, get at least 5-10 inbound links to each page minimum (if that page is expected to gain traction) otherwise, link to another page that is the preferred landing page and get deep links to it.
16. Keyword Stemming - Link to a page with multiple anchors (to create keyword stemming) and with “exact match” keywords to elevate just that term.
    • You can control how each page in your website ranks by being mindful about internal and external lining habits. This post called SEO Rankings and How to Create Them provides a masterful breakdown of this process.
17. RSS Feed Syndication - Set up multiple RSS feeds within a site to syndicate your content to attract natural backlinks from other sites.
    • A proper RSS campaign alone can build sufficient links for your website. Combined with a content development strategy and time-released topical content, this alone can drive traffic and increase domain authority to produce rankings and relevance in even the most competitive vertical markets. This post SEO, RSS and the Power of Syndication provides SEO techniques and tactics for RSS feeds and RSS aggregation.
18. Trust Rank – Linking from aged pages can pass along trust to new landing pages or sub folders or sub domains. Don’t look past your own site for ranking factor.
    • Passing along trust rank can save you months of waiting for search results to mature from fresh content. Here is a post that shows you how to identify and link from older more relevant pages to new pages to augment rankings and more importantly, trust. This method is designed to augment on page SEO and consolidate ranking factor from all pages to the new preferred landing page.
19. Sitemaps – Use sitemaps to not only tie the site together, but also as a way to nourish pages like an irrigation system through linking to them.
    • Here are a few other useful SEO tips you can use in addition to using sitemaps to improve rankings.
20. Sub Domains – Despite abuse in the past, sub domains still work.
    • If your website is sagging under its own weight, then segment a new section of the site with a subdomain to emphasize topical content or to topple a competitive keyword vertical.
    • Search engines pay particular attention to keywords in the URL and while you cannot always make the best of a bad situation, sometimes you can create islands of relevance using a keyword rich subdomain to augment your existing website to create a new beacon of relevance.
    • Here is a post on which is better for SEO, subdomains or subfolders. The choice ultimately is up to you, or even using a combination of both is entirely relevant. Site architecture must work in tandem with content, links and conversion. All are mere pieces of the puzzle until consolidated.

Consider this our late stocking stuffer to you all and we wish you a happy and prosperous new year from SEO Design Solutions. If you haven’t already, feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed for daily SEO tips and tactics to distinguish your website in search engines.  All the best to you all in 2010.

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http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/seo-tips/20-seo-tips-for-2010/

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Balanced Scorecards

The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a strategic performance management tool for measuring whether the smaller-scale operational activities of a company are aligned with its larger-scale objectives in terms of vision and strategy.

The underlying rationale is that organizations cannot directly influence financial outcomes, as these are “lag” measures, and that the use of financial measures alone to inform the strategic control of the firm is unwise. Organizations should instead also measure those areas where direct management intervention is possible. In so doing, the early versions of the Balanced Scorecard helped organizations achieve a degree of “balance” in selection of performance measures. In practice, early Scorecards achieved this balance by encouraging managers to select measures from three additional categories or perspectives: “Customer,” “Internal Business Processes” and “Learning and Growth.”

History of balanced scorecard(BSC)

The first balanced scorecard was created by Art Schneiderman (an independent consultant on the management of processes) in 1987 at Analog Devices, a mid-sized semiconductor company. Other early applications of the concept in various companies were conducted by Harvard professor Dr. Robert S. Kaplan and others in a Nolan-Norton Institute study group. In 1992, Kaplan and David P. Norton began reporting the findings of their initial balanced scorecard experience through a series of journal articles. In 1996, they published a seminal book The Balanced Scorecard

http://www.datawg.com/what-are-bi-scorecards.html

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Glassfish vs Weblogic

There are some notable differences. Glassfish is the first AS to support Java EE 6. Glassfish also supports more recent versions of JSP and Java Servlets. There are some differences in OS and Databases supported, but the common platforms are supported by both products.

There is one major difference that presents a challenge for Oracle….Glassfish is free.

So what will Oracle do now with a free Glassfish? Look for Oracle to continue bundling the Glassfish product like it has already announced for any licensed Weblogic deal. Also, I expect Oracle to further develop and market support for Glassfish. Oracle takes this approach for Oracle Enterprise Unlimited Linux (EUL) which is a rebranding of Redhat’s RHEL. There is money to be made in providing enterprise level support for open source products.

It is not likely that Oracle will start charging licensing for Glassfish. For one thing, a very stable version of the product is already available as open source. For another, people would flock to Redhat’s JBoss if Oracle adds a pricetag to Glassfish. To keep market share and stay competitive with Redhat Oracle will continue to invest in developing and supporting Glassfish. Therefore, choosing customers should feel comfortable that Glassfish is a viable option for the long haul.

David is a Partner and VP at Knowledge Systems, a consulting firm specializing in enterprise application services and solutions. www.ksllc.com

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/enterprise-apps/glassfish-vs-weblogic-36958

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The following ranking:

Rank 1: BitDefender Antivirus (www.bitdefender.com)
Rank 2: Kaspersky Anti-Virus (www.kaspersky.com)
Rank 3: Webroot Antivirus with Spysweeper (www.webroot.com)
Rank 4: Norton AntiVirus (www.symantec.com)
Rank 5. ESET NOD32 (www.eset.com)
Rank 6: AVG Anti-Virus (www.avg.com)
Rank 7: F-Secure Anti-Virus (www.f-secure.com)
Rank 8: G DATA Antivirus (www.gdatasoftware.com)
Rank 9: Avira AntiVir (www.avira.com)
Rank 10: Trend Micro (www.trendmicro.com)

From all that until now I still always rely kaspersky, although sometimes I also use other antivirus kaspersky if it is unable to detect a virus that attacked my computer. as an example I use is SmadAV, a local anti-virus products from Indonesia

http://www.hopskole.net/best-antivirus-10-list-of-best-antivirus-2010/

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Carolyn Duffy Marsan, NetworkWorld

For more information about enterprise networking, go to NetworkWorld. Story copyright 2010 Network World Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/185768/10_ways_the_internet_will_change_in_2010.html

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I started writing my beginner’s guide to WordPress SEO a while back, and have since done a load of posts on the subject, an article in the Search Marketing Standard, newsletters, and presentations. It’s time to let all the info of all these different articles fall into one big piece: the final guide to WordPress SEO.

If you’re more of a visual type, try this WordPress SEO video. It’s an hour long presentation I gave at A4UExpo London, that covers most of what’s in here too.

As search, SEO, and the WordPress platform evolve I will keep this article up to date with best practices. If you don’t have the time to do this kind of optimization yourself, consider hiring us to do it, check out our WordPress consulting services.

As I take quite a holistic view on SEO, this guide will cover quite a lot, here’s the contents:

1. The basic technical optimization: simplest stuff, highest rewards
   1. Permalinks
   2. Optimize your Titles for SEO
   3. Optimize your Descriptions
   4. Optimize the More text
   5. Image Optimization
2. Template optimization
   1. Breadcrumbs
   2. Headings
   3. Clean up your code
   4. Aim for speed
   5. Rethink that Sidebar
3. Advanced technical optimization: preventing duplicate content
   1. Noindex, follow archive pages
   2. Disable unnecessary archives
   3. Pagination
   4. Nofollowing unnecessary links
4. Altering your blog’s structure for high rankings
   1. Pages instead of posts
   2. New wine in an old bottle: use well ranking-posts to rank even better
   3. Linking to related posts
5. Conversion optimization: get those readers to subscribe!
6. Comment optimization: get those readers involved
   1. How should you get people to comment
   2. Bond with your commenters
   3. Keeping people in the conversation
7. Off site blog SEO
   1. Follow your commenters
   2. Use Twitter
   3. Find related blogs, and work them
8. Conclusion

1. Basic technical optimization

Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well optimized system, and does a far better job at allowing every single page to be indexed than every other CMS I have used. But there’s a few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.

1.1. Permalinks

The first thing to change is your permalink structure. In WordPress 2.5, you’ll find this page under Settings -> Permalinks. The default permalink is
?p=<postid>, but I prefer to use either /post-name/ or /category/post-name/. For the first option, you change the “custom” setting into /%postname%/:

To include the category, you change it to /%category%/%postname%/.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to install the Redirection plugin, and make sure that under Manage -> Redirection -> Options, making sure both URL Monitoring select boxes are set to “Modified posts”. Now you can change those permalinks to perfectly SEO‘d permalinks without having to do anything else, or worry about the search engine consequences.

WWW vs non-WWW
Another good thing to configure now you’re on that screen anyway is the Root domain: Add WWW / Strip WWW one. Make a choice, and set it here, don’t enable both, some search engines still can’t handle that. And enable the redirect index.php/index.html one too, it won’t hurt you, and might even do your WordPress SEO some good.

URL stopwords
The last thing you’ll want to do about your permalinks to increase your WordPress SEO, is install the SEO Slugs plugin, this will automatically remove stop words from your slugs once you save a post, so you won’t get those ugly long URL’s when you do a sentence style post title.

1.2. Optimize your Titles for SEO

By default, the title for your blog posts is “Blog title » Blog Archive » Keyword rich post title”. For your WordPress blog to get the traffic it deserves, this should be the other way around, for two reasons:

• Search engines put more weight on the early words, so if your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well.
• People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.

For more info on how to craft good titles for your posts, see this excellent article and video by Aaron Wall: Google & SEO Friendly Page Titles. I prefer to do this with HeadSpace, as that makes it very very easy. You should check your header.php though, and make sure that the code for wp_title(); contains two quotes, so it looks like this: wp_title('');. This makes sure you have absolute control over the title and don’t have any annoying separator in there.

After that, go into the HeadSpace settings, and make them look something like this for your posts and pages:

For the other pages, I have the following settings:

• Posts / Pages: %%title%% - Blog Title
• Categories: %%category%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
• Tags: %%tag%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
• Archives: Blog Archives %%page%% - Blog Title

With HeadSpace, you can also write optimized titles for each post specifically, overriding the settings here. This way you have absolute control over your titles, and can make sure your WordPress titles are actually helping your SEO.

1.3. Optimize your Descriptions

Give each category a decent description, and use HeadSpace to add that description to the meta description, by adding %%category_description%% in the Description field. After that, write a description for each post or page that you actually want to rank with. The descriptions has one very important function: enticing people to click, so make sure it states what’s in the page they’re clicking towards, and that it gets their attention.

Automated descriptions
In my opinion, auto generating descriptions is a load of bull, most plugins pick the first sentence, which might be an introductory sentence which has hardly anything to do with the subject, or another sentence with a keyword in it, which might be completely wrong to pick as description. Thus, the only well written description is a hand written one, and if you’re thinking of auto generating the meta description, you might as well not do anything and let the search engine control the snippet… If you don’t use the meta description, the search engine will find the keyword searched for in your document, and automatically pick a string around that, which gives you a bolded word or two in the results page.

Auto generating a snippet is a “shortcut”, and there are no real shortcuts in (WordPress) SEO (none that work anyway).

1.4. Optimize the More text

Another neat featuer of HeadSpace is that you can use it to optimize the more text, so if you use a more tag on the frontpage, you can replace the default “Read more” link with something meaningful for every post. It’s small things like that that make your WordPress SEO the best.

1.5. Image Optimization

An often overlooked part of WordPress SEO is how you handle your images. By doing stuff like writing good alt tags for images and thinking of how you name the files, you can get yourself a bit of extra traffic from the different image search engines. Next to that, you’re helping out your lesser able readers who check out your site in a screen reader, to make sense of what’s otherwise hidden to them.

You should of course be writing good titles and alt tags for each and every image, however, if you don’t have the time for that, there is a plugin that can help you. The plugin is called SEO Friendly Images, and it can automatically add the title of the post and or the image name to the image’s alt and title tag:

2. Template Optimization

2.1. Breadcrumbs

You’ll want to add breadcrumbs to your single posts and pages. Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like “Home > Articles > WordPress SEO“. They are good for two things:

• They allow your users to easily navigate your site.
• They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. If the post is in multiple categories it should pick one. For that to work, adapt single.php and page.php in your theme, and use my breadcrumb plugin.

2.2. Headings

Although most themes for WordPress get this right, make sure your post title is an <h1>, and nothing else. Your blog’s name should only be an <h1> on your frontpage, and on single, post, and category pages, it should be no more than an <h3>.

These are easy to edit in the post.php and page.php templates. To learn more about why proper headings are important read this article on Semantic HTML and SEO.

2.3. Clean up your code

All that javascript and CSS you might have in your template files, move that to external javascripts and css files, and keep your templates clean, as they’re not doing your WordPress SEO any good. This makes sure your users can cache those files on first load, and search engines don’t have to download them most of the time.

2.4. Aim for speed

A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will spider on your blog each day, is how speedy your blog loads. You can do two things to increase the speed of your WordPress.

1. Optimize the template to do as small an amount of database calls as necessary. I’ve highlighted how to do this in my post about speeding up WordPress.
2. Install a caching plugin. I highly recommend WP-Super-Cache, which is a bit of work to set up, but that should make your blog an awful lot faster.

Also, be aware that underpaying for hosting, is not wise. If you actually want to succeed with your link-bait actions, and want your blog to sustain high loads, go for a good hosting package. I’ve recently switched to WestHost myself, and they’ve proven to be better than anything I’ve ever seen in hosting.

2.5. Rethink that Sidebar

Do you really need to link out to all your buddies in your blogroll site wide? Or is it perhaps wiser to just do that on your front page? Google and other search engines these days heavily discount site wide links, so you’re not really doing your friends any more favor by giving them that site wide link, nor are you helping yourself: you’re allowing your visitors to get out of your site everywhere, when you actually want them to browse around a bit.

The same goes for the search engines: on single post pages, these links aren’t necessarily related to the topic at hand, and thus aren’t helping you at all. Thus: get rid of them. There are probably more widgets like these that only make sense on the homepage, and others that you’d only want on sub pages.

Some day you will probably be able to change this from inside WordPress, right now it forces you to either use two sidebars, one on the homepage and one on sub pages, or write specific plugins.

3. Advanced WordPress SEO and Duplicate Content

Once you’ve done all the basic stuff, you’ll find that the rest of the problems amount to one simple thing: duplicate content. Loads of it in fact. Out of the box, WordPress comes with a few different types of taxonomy:

1. date based
2. category based
3. tag based

Next to that, it seems to think you actually need to be able to click on from page to page starting at the frontpage, way back to the first post you ever did. Last but not least, each author has his own archive too, under /author/<author-name>/, resulting in completely duplicate content on single author blogs.

In essence that means that, worst case scenario, a post is available on 5 pages outside of the single page where it should be available. We’re going to get rid of all those duplicate content pools, by still allowing them to be spidered, but not indexed, and fixing the pagination issues that come with these things.

3.1. Noindex, follow archive pages

Install my robots meta plugin, and make sure the settings prevent indexing of all archive pages, like this:
SEO” />

Now the search engine will follow all the links on these archive pages, but it won’t show those pages in the index. Not everybody will agree on this policy, and others will tell you to just show a snippet of each post on the archive page. That’ll also work, but in my opinion completely throwing them out is better.

3.2. Disable unnecessary archives

If your blog is a one author blog, or you don’t think you need author archives, use the robots-meta plugin to disable the author archives. Also, if you don’t think you need a date based archive: disable it. Even if you’re not using these archives in your template, someone might link to them and thus break your WordPress SEO…

3.3. Pagination

Thirdly, you’ll want to make sure that if a bot goes to a category page, it can reach all underlying pages without any trouble. Otherwise, if you have a lot of posts in a category, a bot might have to go back 10 pages before being able to find the link to one of your awesome earlier posts…

There’s an easy fix. Jaimie Sirovich wrote Pagerfix, a plugin that helps you make your pagination look like this:

To reach that, install that plugin, and change this section in f.i. your index.php:

<div>
  <div>
    <?php next_posts_link('« Older Entries') ?>
  </div>
  <div>
    <?php previous_posts_link('Newer Entries »') ?>
  </div>
</div>

Into this:

<div>
  <?php
    pager_fix(" "," "," ","« Previous page","Next Page »","strong");
  ?>
</div>

Do that in your index.php, your archives.php, and all other archive templates you might have.

3.4. Nofollowing unnecessary links

Another easy step to increase your WordPress SEO is to stop linking to your login and registration pages from each and every page on your blog. The same goes for your RSS feeds, your subscribe by e-mail link, etc. Robots Meta has an option to nofollow all your login and registration links. You’ll probably have to go into your RSS links and nofollow those by hand. If you’re using the meta widget, you might want to enable the option in robots meta to replace that with one that has nofollowed links.

4. Altering your blog’s structure for high rankings

Blogs are spidered so easily due to their structure of categories, tags etc.: all articles are well linked, and usually the markup is nice and clean. However, all this comes at a price: your ranking strength is diluted. They’re diluted by one simple thing: comments.

4.1. Pages instead of posts

You’ve probably noticed by now, or you’re seeing now, that this WordPress SEO post is actually… not a post. It’s a page. Why? Well for several reasons. First of all, this article needed to be a “daughter”-page of my WordPress page, to be in the correct place on this blog. Secondly, to rank for the term [WordPress SEO], this article has to have the right keyword density. And that’s where things go wrong. Comments destroy your carefully constructed keyword density.

That’s why I decided to make my most important articles into pages. That way, you can easily update them and do a new post about what you’ve changed.

4.2. New wine in an old bottle

If a post on your blog becomes incredibly popular and starts to rank for a nice keyword, like mine did for WordPress SEO, you could do the following:

• create a new page with updated and improved content
• change the slug of the old post to post-name-original
• publish the new page under the old post’s URL, or redirect the old post’s URL to the new URL
• send an e-mail to everyone who linked to your old post that you’ve updated and improved on your old post
• wait for the links to come in, again;
• rank even higher for your desired term as you’ve now got:
  • more control over the keyword density
  • even more links pointing at the article
  • the ability to keep updating the article as you see fit to improve on it’s content and ranking

Some among you will say: I could have 301 redirected the old post to the new one with the same effect. True. Except: you’d lose the comments on the old post, which is in my opinion a sign of disrespect to people who took the time to comment, and 301 redirects take quite a bit of time sometimes. Of course you should treat this technique with care, and not abuse it to rank other products, but I think it can be done in everyone’s benefit. For instance this article: if you came here through a social media site like Sphinn, expecting an article about WordPress SEO, that’s exactly what you got!

4.3. Linking to related posts

One way of getting search engines to get to your older content a bit easier, thus increasing your WordPress SEO capabilites a LOT, is by using a related posts plugin. These plugins search through your posts database to find posts with the same subject, and add links to these posts.

There’s a load of these available, but I just use the one that comes with the Simple Tags plugin, as I’ve found that the easiest and best one so far.

5. Conversion optimization: get those readers to subscribe!

A lot of bloggers still think that because their blog is a blog, they don’t have to optimize anything. Wrong. To get people to link to you, they have to read your blog. And what do you think is easier: getting someone who is already visiting your blog to visit regularly and then link to your blog, or getting someone who visits your blog for the first time to link to your blog immediately? Right.

That’s why conversion optimization is so vitally important to bloggers as well: they need to learn how to test their call to actions on their blog so that more people will subscribe, either by e-mail or by RSS. (Ow btw, if you haven’t subscribed to this blog yet, do it now!)

One of the things I’ve found to be very important, and more bloggers seem to have found this, is that a BIG RSS subscribe button is very important, as is offering a way to subscribe by e-mail. I even offer daily and weekly e-mail subscribe options, using aweber (aff), and have found that people tend to really like those options too.

Another thing to be very aware of is when people might want to subscribe to your blog. If they’ve just finished reading an article of yours, and really liked it, that would be the ideal time to reach them, right? That’s why more and more people are adding lines like this to the end of their posts: “Liked this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!”

Another great time to get people to subscribe is when people have just commented on your blog for the first time, for which purpose I use the awesome comment relish plugin. Which leads me to the next major aspect of WordPress SEO:

6. Comment optimization: get those readers involved

Comments are one of the most important aspects of blogs. As Wikipedia states:

The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.

Comments are not only nice because people tell you how special you are, or that you made a mistake, or whatever else they have to tell you. Most of all they’re nice, because they show engagement. And engagement is one of the most important factors of getting people to link to you: they show you they care, and they open the conversation, now all you have to do is respond, and you’re building a relationship!

6.1. How should you get people to comment

The easiest way of getting people to do anything is: ask them to do it. Write in an engaging style, and then ask your blog’s readers for an opinion, their take on the story etc.

Another important things is your comment links. Is your comment link “No comments »”? Or is it “No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome »”? Feel the difference? You can change this by opening your index.php template, search for comments_popup_link() and changing the texts within that function.

6.2. Bond with your commenters

Another thing to do is thank people when they’ve commented on your weblog. Not every time, because that get’s annoying, but doing it the first time is a very good idea.

Justin Shattuck thought the same, and created the Comment Relish plugin, which I just mentiond, which sends an email after someone has made his first comment. This email is a message you can enter yourself, with for instance your feed URL, and in my case, a newsletter subscribe URL, etc.

Another option, which is a bit less obtrusive / spammy, is to install my comment redirect plugin. This plugin allows you to redirect people who have made their first comment to a specific “thank you” page.

6.3. Keeping people in the conversation

Now that people have joined the conversation on your blog, you should make sure they stay in the conversation. That’s why you should install the subscribe to comments plugin, that allows people to subscribe to a comment thread just like they would in a forum, and sends them an e-mail on each new comment. This way, you can keep the conversation going, and maybe your readers will be giving you new angles for new posts.

7. Off site blog SEO

If you’ve followed all of the above WordPress SEO advice, you’ve got a big chance of becoming successfull, both as a blogger and in the search engines. Now the last step sounds easy, but isn’t. Go out there, and talk to people online.

7.1 Follow your commenters

There’s been a movement on the web for a while now that’s called the “You comment – I follow“. They want you to remove the nofollow tag off of your comments to “reward” your visitors. Now I do agree, but… That get’s you a whole lot of spam once your WordPress blog turns into a well ranked blog… What I do advocate though, is that you actually follow your visitors! Go to their websites, and leave a comment on one of their articles, a good, insightful comment, so they respect you even more.

If you think that’s a lot of work, do realize that, on average, about 1% of your visitors will actually leave a comment. That’s a group of people you have to take care of!

7.2 Use Twitter

Twitter is a cool form of micro-blogging / chatting / whatever you want to call it. Almost all the “cool” people are on there, and they read their tweets more often than they read their e-mail, if you even knew how to reach them through e-mail.

To boot, if you use WordTwit or Twitter Tools, all of your posts can be announced on Twitter, which will usually get you quite a few early readers! People will feel even more happy to comment on Twitter, which might get you into an extra conversation or two.

7.3 Find related blogs, and work them

If you want to rank for certain keywords, go into Google Blogsearch, and see which blogs rank in the top 10 for those keywords. Read those blogs, start posting insightful comments, follow up on their posts by doing a post on your own blog and link back to them: communicate! The only way to get the links you’ll need to rank is to be a part of the community.

8. Conclusion

This guide gives you a lot of stuff you can do on your blog. It goes from technical tips, to conversion tips, to content tips, to conversation tips, and a whole lot in between. There’s a catch though: if you want to rank for highly competitive terms, you’ll have to actually do most of it.

If you want to keep updated on the latest news about WordPress, and hear more tips as I come up with them, then subscribe to my WordPress mailing-list right now! If you need help implementing all the tips in this article, you can hire me to do the work for you!

http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

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Blue Ocean Strategy and the HVAC Business

I was on vacation last week in Mexico. The beautiful blue ocean reminded me of one of the most useful business books I have ever read, Blue Ocean Strategy, written by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. The main premise of the book is that most businesses find themselves competing in “red oceans”, markets in which companies and their offerings are very similar and

profitable growth is all but impossible. Companies compete by offering more  and better and are often forced to charge less. Sound familiar? A big part of this problem is that there are more products and companies chasing fewer customers. Supply is greater than demand. The bad news is this is not going to change; the good news is that the book offers strategies and perspectives that allow us to think about our businesses and customers in different ways and allows us to create “blue oceans” in which we don’t compete but make the competition irrelevant.

http://www.controltrends.org/2009/11/blue-ocean-strategy-and-the-hvac-business/

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As the Drupal community and lots of newcomers all descend on San Francisco this week, I am making just one (maybe not so bold) prediction: This conference is the tipping point. Later, we will look back and pinpoint this as when Drupal really went big. Viewing Drupal as both a product, and as a platform with a maturity curve is a concept that has stayed with me since Dries used a technology product adoption curve approach to illustrate the maturity of Drupal during his traditional State of Drupal keynote in Paris (courtesy of ultimike from Drupal Easy). As I consider the way in which Drupal use is growing wildly in 2010, I think that the project itself is reaching a point of maturity we can no longer measure simply in terms of progress on releases, code contributions or downloads alone. There are lots of measures

of so called “community progress” which have given way to many more exciting signs of maturity with respect to the larger market and ecosystem. Of particular note this year is the adoption of Drupal as the platform of choice for large established organizations in the publishing, media, entertainment and government spaces. To me, the embracing of Drupal by large organizations defines the point at which a technology “has arrived” on the scene and is likely to be taken seriously. It is also a good sign that it will stick around as an important technology with an installed base for a while to come. Why is this all happening now? It is likely a combination of many things: maturity of the product itself, size of the installed base, growth in community popularity and participation, and lack of affordable alternatives for comparable web 2.0 functionality. I actually prefer to view it more as the maturity of Drupal as a platform through which the Drupal technology community is pushing Drupal forward – potentially straight into enterprise software territory. Here is my “top ten style” list of the technology trends I see fueling this growth.

10. Flexible Architecture

Brute force is a bad way to build sites. One of the great things about Drupal is how you can use it to create sites in increasingly smarter ways like multi-site configurations where sites sharing the same core with shared components like modules can be setup in permutations like: virtual sites, multi-sites, and micro-sites. Another great thing is the installation profile that allows pre-fab site construction to occur. There are a lot of real world use cases for why these are important to big organizations developing sites. The key is repeatability. No one wants to re-invent each site in a cluster of similar properties when they share lots of the same components, themes and even content. The Drupal community is leading the way on strategies to accomplish re-use through these schemes more than any other CMS I know.

9. Deployment Improvements

I am fascinated by the idea that there are still limitless opportunities for more efficient ways to integrate, test, deploy and maintain code. In our firm, deployment is a serious and sacred subject because nothing makes the pros stand apart from the amateurs more than how you manage and control your code and environments. It is also incredibly important to us that we minimize the amount of time these activities take relative to the more creative (and ultimately more value adding and rewarding) activities of solution design and code development. As we build more and more Drupal sites and deploy them to larger and increasingly complex environments, we need tools to make this process better. The best practices are far from universalized and institutionalized at this point, but many leading tools and processes are pushing this forward including Aegir from DevelopmentSeedand continuous integration techniques from firms like Chapter Three and Four Kitchens.

8. The Cloud

Sure this trend is not unique or native to the Drupal community, but clearly using the flexibility of cloud-based environments to host sites and deploy assets has reached critical mass. For some, this includes deploying file assets like audio and video to S3 to free server resources, for others it means using Amazon EC2 for scalable deployment environments. It seems like new products and strategies for hosting sites in the cloud are being deployed every week. Chapter Three’s “Pantheon” framework for creating and managing Amazon Management Interfaces (AMIs) is a good example home grown in the Drupal community. Acquia provides complete cloud based hosting as its only infrastructure offering. Whether you plan to host in the cloud or augment physical servers with cloud-based services, this trend provides huge opportunity for software developers to make hardware “programmable” and more responsive to our ability to script and control resources without physical dependencies.

7. Semantic Web

Having a keynote session in Paris dedicated to semantic web is a great reminder that our community is on the leading edge of how to program for web3.0. Drupal 7 code development was frozen on-time with some notable exceptions and RDF, despite its trickiness and difficulty, made the cut. Including support for RDF and RDFa representations of data probably didnt even make the roadmap for most CMS products in 2009 because it is such a forward thinking approach towards the semantic web. RDF is what makes our data portable, machine readable and light years ahead of other design-centric CMSs. Our community is full of developers, academics, and companies that understand why this is important and are setting a course to make Drupal the semhead’s CMS of choice. When we released our suite of openCalais modules in 2008 for using this amazing web web service for semantic metatagging of content we learned how respected Drupal was in the semantic web community – a group of very smart folks that don’t dote on technologies lightly. I have no doubt that inspiring technologists working on the Drupal RDF team like Arto Bendiken, Miglius Alaburda, Ben Lavender, Jeff Miccolis, Frank Febbraro, Stéphane Corlosquet and of course, Dries will keep us bleeding edge on the semantic web for some time to come.

6. Features

The features concept has the potential to make significant impacts on the Drupal architecture by establishing a re-use model that developers use to create end user functionality. The concept of features was all over the Paris conference and has since been moving quickly through the community from theory to reality. While OpenAtrium stands as the best example of how to use features, the possibilities for how to make this impact many aspects of Drupal are just beginning to be discussed. Essentially the concept of features is that “ready to go” functionality can be created, re-used and shared if the components of that functionality (includes content types, views, modules, theme) could be bundled and exported as a self contained entity. It is exciting and refreshing to see that innovations can occur in the way Drupal sites are constructed from within the community and above the core level – it means there is a lot of new ground to cover even still.

5. User Experience

Drupal has embraced one its worst perceived weaknesses and hit usability and user experience hard this past year in preparation for D7. Designers Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt took on the user experience to change the way the world sees Drupal forever. The crux of this issue is that Drupal must invest in improvements to UI as well as features in core. The challenge is striking the balance that keeps Drupal on the leading edge for developers who want flexibility, extensibility and performance over UX. But another way to look at the focus on UX is to question whether Drupal has the best and most mature ways of allowing theming and design on the front end too. In our OpenPublish distribution, we determined the answer to that question was decisively no and we set about making it easier to theme knowing that more advanced publications would be more interested in it as a result. We recognized the same with our administrative interfaces and switched to a slightly modified version of Admin2 created by DevelopmentSeed that is much simpler, more intuitive and (when combined with a theme like Rubik) frankly better looking than any admin we had used before. Bringing these user experiences questions to the fore front this past year has helped to bring designers and developers together in a way that the Drupal community sorely needed – even when there was disagreement. It takes a balance of form and function to create a truly robust product. All efforts to improve Drupal user experience are exciting because it is one less thing that the rest of the world can say Drupal “doesnt do well.” I love that this community seeks these things out and attacks them with vigor.

4. Security

Have you read “Cracking Drupal” by Greg Knaddison ? It was all the rage of Drupal books for developers. What it says to me is that this community is taking security seriously enough to have books written on the subject instead of a series of checklists (ahem!) I am certainly no security expert, but I do spend a lot of time discussing the pros and cons of Drupal vs. other CMS solutions with some pretty tough customers and have for many years. Less and less do I hear concerns about Drupal and more and more I hear it about competing platforms. I think this is yet another area where the community has recognized a potential weakness and improved its focus and collective energies. The Drupal security team doesnt sit around updating a wiki with lists of compromised modules, they act. What does for the rest of the community is establish an urgency around ensuring that vulnerabilities dont take control of the platform and its reputation.

3. Consumer Drupal

In 2009, Acquia introduced Beta Drupal Gardens and set sites on the consumer market for SaaS sites dominated by players like WordPress.com and other products for the microsite marketplace. Lullabot has a similar concept that addresses different aspects of the Do It Yourself SaaS site called Buzzr. Clearly the need for something to capture what is more or less the general consumer marketplace is going to reach a pinnacle in 2010. But many developers and early community defenders were also questioning the strategy behind this concept. Clearly not everyone is onboard with the idea of looking at Drupal as a tool for the common man. Honestly I did not either at first, but I think the key to understanding what is happening here is to think of this as one more part of the puzzle of making Drupal go big, real big. We have to try to think of the Drupal community as a diverse ecosystem of consumers and providers of all types reaching different market segments. No doubt mid market popularity of Drupal among non-profits, private companies and publishers is already skyrocketing and large enterprises are growing more comfortable with open source in general and Drupal specifically. What we are lacking is overwhelming mass market momentum to achieve staying power and build brand ubiquity. I would certainly never advocate that mass market appeal is what is going to make Drupal more interesting, more fun or more rewarding. However, it would be good to gain some staying power by having a version that appeals to a wider audience.

2. Scalability

Some things do change, but everyone is still asking the same question: Does Drupal perform at an enterprise level? This is one of those discussions that just won’t die, but the evidence is all around us that Drupal can handle enterprise use cases. For sure sending an open source platform up against commercially funded and supported tools that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for organizations that get millions of page views and expect 24/7/365 uptime can be a bit daunting. But the proof is mounting that with the help of infrastructure tools like CDNs, proxy caching, redundant virtualized servers, and some good old fashion well planned architecture, it can be done. Perhaps the community needs to raise a showcase site to present how heavily trafficked sites and publications are running Drupal every day? Or maybe just better education about what truly effects performance and how Drupal can address each point? Whatever it takes, this may be the biggest weight holding Drupal down right now and one that is destined to be lifted this year if more high traffic examples are unveiled.

1. Drupal Product Development

We went big on developing Drupal distributions (“distros”) over the last two years because we felt we had more to offer back to the community than modules – we wanted to build stuff that showed how flexible and powerful Drupal could be. Modules help Drupal developers, but distros like OpenPublish can be and are used by non-community business users. When you build dozens of Drupal sites, you see patterns, commonalities, and ways to package products that serve specific needs. My colleague Irakli our Director of Product Development, wrote a prolific post on our strategy that I think still summarizes our views on this. Many of the most proficient Drupal development shops including DevelopmentSeed, Lullabot, Acquia, Phase2, and Four Kitchens build distros for their own reasons, but I suspect a lot of the inspiration behind this trend is because distros give us a creative outlet to show how to make things from Drupal that are cool and work. When we released Tattler (app), a topic monitoring tool for the Web, we wanted it to demonstrate a unique use case for Drupal which opens up more ideas and spurs innovation. It was a proof of what could be done not a complete product we wanted to sell. Of course there is a danger to all of this re-packaging of Drupal. Those of us doing it, need to set some better ground rules and remain committed to not branching from core community principles and core architecture. A lot of consensus has emerged on this front over even just the last six months. Distros also help to grow the ecosystem. Hosting companies are emerging with plans to sell packages of these distros directly to consumers as fully managed installations. Themers like AdaptiveThemes plan to sell custom and off the shelf themes for specific distros like OpenPublish. I have no idea how many people have been attracted to using Drupal by distros like OpenPublish and Open Atrium but from anecdotal evidence I have, its a lot. We hear things like “I didnt know where to start with Drupal or what to do with it, but now I do…” According to DevelopmentSeed close to 100,000 people have downloaded OpenAtrium so far. How many of those were capable of developing a high quality intranet based upon Drupal before that? Pretty powerful stuff.

Conclusion

So my conclusion is that Drupal for the Enterprise is here – at least technically. Now it is time for the community to drive it home. Big customers are shopping Drupal and many more than you might expect are using it. But it is not just about open source vs. proprietary anymore, nor is the issue simply whether Drupal can perform, scale and be secure enough. The tools to do wondrous technical things exist. The truth that the Drupal community now needs to realize is that the art of the big engagement is as much about process, project management, best practices and professionalism. I dont think Drupal is quite at the point where legions of Accenture and IBM consultants are going to flood “zero to hero” sessions at Drupalcon, but with success comes attention and with attention comes scrutiny so get ready Drupal your biggest trials and glory are still ahead.

http://www.agileapproach.com/blog-entry/big-drupal-ten-trends-enterprise

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In this article, I’ll examine the importance of the Alexa Rank as it relates to site monetization while briefly discussing some of the weaknesses involved in using Alexa ranking as a reliable traffic measure for any website.

Lastly, I’ve also included an extensive list of twenty methods and strategies you can use to increase your Alexa Rank dramatically in the short and long run.

What is the Alexa Rank?

Put simply, the Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases its ranking schema on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who visit a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

See Alexa’s definition of the Alexa Traffic Rank:

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users 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 the geometric mean of 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)

Why would you want to increase your Alexa rank?

Webmasters, advertisers and ad networks use your blog’s Alexa rank as a gauge to determine the worth of a link on your website. If you depend on link or site selling as a form of monetization you’ll definitely want to increase your Alexa rank, because it’ll increase your bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing.

ReviewMe, Text Link Ads and Sponsored Reviews are just three of the networks which base your ad selling strength on Alexa Ranks.

Problems with the Alexa Rank

Alexa ranking is heavily skewed towards websites which have a large webmaster/tech audience. This is because webmasters or web savvy audiences are much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed than websites whose visitors are unaware of Alexa.

As such, many have indicated that Alexa is a vastly inaccurate method of measuring a website’s reach, traffic and potential. I don’t disagree.

Alexa is a silly way to measure web traffic but unfortunately, in an imperfect world Alexa is still heavily used by webmasters and ad networks when measuring the value of advertising on your website.

I understand the defects of Alexa’s ranking system and I’m not going to go into more detail about it here. What’s primarily important to me is that the Alexa Rank has become a central element in site monetization strategies.

I’m not concerned with the utility and value of Alexa but it’s perceived importance in the eyes of potential advertisers.

Dosh Dosh’s Alexa Rank

Since moving to my own domain (from Blogspot) in the middle of January 2007, Dosh Dosh has moved from a rank of around 3 million to the current Alexa rank of 21, 709 within two months.

The growth has been consistent and I think most of it was due to the fact that the content on Dosh Dosh is orientated towards webmasters. Another plausible reason is because overall daily traffic for Dosh Dosh has been growing steadily day by day.

The increase in Alexa Rank was also partially due to the fact that I’m active in several webmaster forums, notably Digital Point which sends me some visitors every day. Getting stumbled and receiving thousands of visitors in a day has also undoubtedly helped to increase Dosh Dosh’s Alexa Rank.

How do I get started with Alexa?

There are two easy ways to start using Alexa. If you are using Internet Explorer, visit this page and download the Alexa Toolbar. If you’re using Firefox, download the SearchStatus extension which displays the Alexa Rank, Google PageRank as well as other useful features.

I highly recommend that you use Firefox and SearchStatus instead of Alexa toolbar, which I find to be more bulky and less useful.

Can one actually game or manipulate the Alexa Ranking?

I believe that there are methods which will allow you to easily bring an Alexa ranking in the millions down to the 100,000 level. However, bringing it past the 10,000 or 1,000 mark is a considerably more difficult process, because of the stiff competition among websites.

Some have adamantly stated that there are no proven ways to game Alexa, while others have claimed that auto-surfs and scripts do work to some degree.

I’m not going to take any sides because I can’t guarantee that auto-surfs or other artificial methods will have similar effects for every blog.

The easiest way to know to know if any of the tips mentioned below really work is to actually try them for yourselves and monitor the results.

20 Ways to Increase your Alexa Rank

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.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.doshdosh.com . Replace doshdosh.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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. 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.

Resources on Alexa Rank

Several of the tips listed above were taken from Aaron Wall’s article on Alexa Ranking. This post by Aaron will also give you some insight on Alexa’s webmaster bias.

A lower Alexa number means a greater level of traffic, and the traffic drops off logarithmically. You can fake a good Alexa score using various techniques, but if it shows your rankings in the millions then your site likely has next to no traffic.

Alexa by itself does not mean that much, but it simply provides a rough snapshot of what is going on. It can be spammed, but if a site has a ranking in the millions then it likely has little traffic.

Peter Norvig writes about Alexa Toolbar and the Problem of Experiment Design. He examines some problems with Alexa as a traffic measuring tool:

But one bias they don’t really comment on is the selection bias: the data would be good if it truly represented a random sample of internet users, but in fact it only represents those who have installed the Alexa toolbar, and that sample is not random.

The samplees must be sophisticated enough to know how to install the toolbar, and they must have some reason to want it. It turns out that the toolbar tells you things about web sites, so it is useful to people in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry, so it overrepresents those people.

Google’s Matt Cutts compares his website against Ask.com and explains why his website enjoys such an impressive Alexa ranking:

One possible source of skewing in Alexa data is a bias toward webmaster-y sites. Alexa shows how popular web sites are, so it’s natural that webmasters install the Alexa toolbar.

Some do it just so that their normal day-to-day visits around the web (including their own site) are added to Alexa’s stats. The net effect is that webmaster-related sites are going to look more important to Alexa

Marketing Scoop has some tips on improving the Alexa Rank. (Thanks Beth!)

A very long thread on Digital Point which sees webmasters having a discussion on how Alexa Ranks can be gamed or manipulated through scripts and auto-surfs. Worth a read.

There you have it… twenty ways to boost your Alexa Rank and increase your site’s monetization potential.

What do you think of Alexa? Have you tried increasing your Alexa Rank by any of these methods?

If you’ll like to receive future updates on ways to improve your Alexa Rank, do consider subscribing to my blog feed.

http://www.doshdosh.com/20-quick-ways-to-increase-your-alexa-rank/

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If you want a safer solution, there’s a new Facebook “like” bookmarklet you can use instead.

The bookmarklet was created by Kyle Bragger, formerly the CTO of Cork’d, a social networking site for wine lovers, and now working on his own project, Forrst, an invite-only community for developers and designers.

Not only does using the bookmarklet he created protect you from “like fraud” as described here, it’s also a handy way to like anything on the Internet – even if there’s no “like” button available on that page.

How to Use the Facebook Like Bookmarklet

To use the bookmarklet, just drag this link to your bookmarks bar in your web browser: Like-o-matic.

Once there, you can click it anytime you’re on a page or website you like.

Like ReadWriteWeb, for example? Click the button. Although there’s no “Facebook Like Button” for the website as a whole (you can, however, find us on Facebook), you’ll be given the opportunity to “like” ReadWriteWeb.

After clicking the bookmarklet once, you’ll see a message appear at the top of the screen: “Be the first of your friends to like this.” Click the button with the thumbs up on it and it will register your like on Facebook and post it to your News Feed.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_like_anything_on_the_web_safely.php#more

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