Alexa Ranking - is it Important or time wasting task for SEO Person

So many times the client's of SEO firms asked to the SEO manager, I want to improve the Alexa rank of my website, or client may be ask why Alexa rank is so down for my website, these are similar type question and having no any pure technical answer that satisfy a client completely. 

Now the second think, if your are working on the in-house projects then the owner of your company can ask the same question. The things is this, we need to know what is Alexa ranking, how Alexa measure it, and is it really important for website traffic, and query conversion or it is just a cosmetic ranking to make the people fool, lets digg all the aspect that are associate with the Alexa ranking and then decide is it really required or not. Lets start with the formation of Alexa, Alexa was founded in 1996 by two American web entrepreneurs Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat. 

The company's name was chosen in homage to the Library of Alexandria. Alexa offered a toolbar that gave Internet users suggestions i.e based on the traffic patterns of its user community 'where to go next', Alexa also offered context for each site visited, to whom it was registered, how many pages it had, how many other sites pointed to it, and how frequently it was updated. 

Alexa ranks sites based primarily on tracking information of users [Registered users] of its toolbar for the Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers, and we everyone know that after launching of Google, very less people used alexa toolbar. Therefore, the webpages viewed are only ranked amongst users who have these sidebars installed, but their numbers are very less, and may be biased if a specific audience subgroup is reluctant to do this. 

Also, the ranking is based on three-months old data, and thus takes time to reflect new changes in web pages content that may happen after a domain has been expired, sold or undergone to a major redesign. Alexa told these words at their website that Alexa’s search results are provided by our own site screener engine. 

The Alexa website provides information about websites and our search engine is geared toward finding sites, not documents, and Alexa’s traffic data is based on a global panel of their Toolbar users. This panel represents a sample of all kind of internet users. 

The panel consists of millions of people those using toolbars created by over 25,000 different publishers, including Alexa and Amazon. hence here we can conclude that instead of waste your time in alexa ranking, give prime focus on the Google SERP ranking to gain traffic and business.

Specialist in SEO Services Delhi, India

How to Promote Web Portal

Everyday we are searching lots of things on Google with the help of keywords, and most of the time we see few sites, like if you search 'schools in delhi', doctors in delhi, hospitals in delhi, coaching centers in delhi, and we see justdial, clickindia, sulekha etc websites, but have you ever think why these sites always on 1st page with everykind of keywords, please think a while. 

The second clue I am giving you, search buy mobile online, buy ac online, buy tv online, buy dvd online etc, then we find flipcart, homeshop18, tradus, snapdeal, naaptol etc sites are there, did you think why? Think what the webmaster and SEOs of these website do, so that these sites ranked with every keyword , some time we think they optimize every page and did off-page work lots then other website, but think for a min, is this possible, as these kind of website or better to say portal having thousands of keywords and lakhs of pages, if we think they submit 10 directory, 10 bookmark and at-least 1 article for each keyword, then? 

Then, the owner of this website will die by the heart attack, because this work needs at-least 2 hours of a day, for the same if we do for 1000 keywords then it need 2000 hours, and in a day one executive work 8 hours then owner needs 250 working days, means 1 year, I counted very less number of keyword. Here I am asking a question, do you think with the suggested work any keyword can rank on google, as per my experience..NO, because this is very less work..then. 

Then, we need to think some ethical tricks, why ethical, because Google is not a gift, google is judge also, to judge your website and punish your website.

Means, we need to select some very important pages, around 100 pages, those having very high competitive keywords, and make them as hub page, means give the link to these very important pages to all the other pages. 

In portal, mainly 3 segments are their, city label page, category label page and final product label page, every portal is divided in these structor, now think what people can think, as per me for the product people think buy..with online, if we think about schools then schools with city and location, some time category, like play schools in delhi or nursery schools in dwarka, the same with the doctors, coaching, institute etc. So, start from the final page, i.e. our product/school/doctor/coaching/institute etc page, place link of category, location and city label at here with good keywords, mainly that we are targeting and also give the link of one similar type products in another product page, but make sure they not more then 10, because more then these can irritate a user or confuse too. 

Create separate xml sitemap and RSS for each category with city and submit them in various rss submission sites, these will help to google to visit every page again and again. We all SEOs knows that very few cities and very few product category is most searchable, hence we need to make them primary pages, and create a knowledge base or article section, here every time post some content give links of 5-10 products/categories/city label pages so that they get back-link as well users those came to this section only to gain knowledge or information. 

Now, come to the top 100 hub pages then we finalized in the initial label, give their links in footer of every page, and as a visitor navigate to inside the website, give them results more keen, means short the results as they wants, like if they are choose a category then show all the city and sub-categories of that category, if they choose city then show sub-category and other locations of that city, but if they select a sub-category then show products of that sub-category and cities. 

In this make sure your breadcrumb is working properly, and anchor tag would be on keyword, then main title in H1 tag, create at-least one sub-title to place H2 tag, keywords with different format can use in the images of that page, and make sure, if from a page if more than one link is going to another page via image also, then place 'nofollow' tag on that image, as one link is fine from a page. Now, the question is comes, what we do in off-page, only take that 100 pages for the promotional purpose, rest urls with get push from these 100 pages and gradually they will start ranking.

Specialist in SEO Services Delhi, India

SEO Guidelines for website and Webpages

1- URL should be static and if possible just after the domain name, like www.example.com/web-design-company-india,

2- Use '-' for joining words in URLs instead of '_' or other things

3- One page should open via only one URL, like

www.example.com/web-design-company-india this page do not open with www.example.com/web-design-company-india/ or www.example.com/web-design-company-india/Index or any other parameters, as they are consider duplicate pages

4- Link for the home page always give via domain name, like www.example.com, do no place www.example.com/index.php or example.com or http://exmaple.com.index.php as they are consider duplicate pages

5- Try to remove canonical issues of www and non-www from the domain, means a sites should always open with www,

6- Place 'nofollow' attributes at all the outgoing links on a page that are going to any other websites

7- If there are shorting system at any pages, and due to that shorting content remain same but the sequence and page URL change, then use 'rel=canonical' at the stating of these duplicate pages, and mention the original page, so that Google can detect it.

8- If there is any calendar on page then user 'nofollow' as this calendar only consume our useful crawling time i.e not useful for the ranking

9- If we are going to use pagination by 1,2,3 or A,B,C.. or <<Prev Next >> then make its URLs [www.example.com/page-1, www.example.com/page-2 etc] Static, if all the pages having different content, otherwise place 'Rel=canonical' of the main landing page.

10- The main heading of every page, highlight with H1 tag, and sub heading by H2 tags, as these two tags are SEO friendly and Google give good priority.

11- If our pages navigated more then 2 steps, then always use 'Bread Crumb' as that will help to user as well search engine to under stand the website' structor.

12- Sitemap of a site can have 50,000 URLs but must not be larger than 50MB [these are very high]

13- Place this code <meta name="robots" content="NOODP">

on the home page of every website to avoid data fetching from open directories

14- Place alt attributes at the image so that SEOs can place their description title about the image

15- If you are usinf javascript, then please call it by file, do not write entire code on the page, as this will help to google bot to crawl a webpage fastly.

16- For the modification in the size and color of font etc, use CSS, as this will help in fast loading.

17- Place 'noindex' and 'nofollow' attributes on the custom 404 page, as this kind of page should not rank in google or not show in the sitelinks

Specialist in SEO Services Delhi, India

What type of Files Google can index

Google can index the content of most types of pages and files. The most common file types Google index include:

1. Adobe Flash (.swf)
2. Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf)
3. Adobe PostScript (.ps)
4. Autodesk Design Web Format (.dwf)
5. Google Earth (.kml, .kmz)
6. GPS eXchange Format (.gpx)
7. Hancom Hanword (.hwp)
8. HTML (.htm, .html, other file extensions)
9. Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx)
10. Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx)
11. Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx)
12. OpenOffice presentation (.odp)
13. OpenOffice spreadsheet (.ods)
14. OpenOffice text (.odt)
15. Rich Text Format (.rtf, .wri)
16. Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg)
17. TeX/LaTeX (.tex)
18. Text (.txt, .text, other file extensions), including source code in common programming languages:
19. Basic source code (.bas)
20. C/C++ source code (.c, .cc, .cpp, .cxx, .h, .hpp)
21. C# source code (.cs)
22. Java source code (.java)
23. Perl source code (.pl)
24. Python source code (.py)
25. Wireless Markup Language (.wml, .wap)
26. XML (.xml)

When you use the filetype: operator in a Google search (for example, filetype:xml galway), Google searches for files with the .xml extension, not for files of file type XML.

Not all URLs or pages have the .html file extension. Some pages (like http://www.google.com) have no extension at all, and some have an extension that doesn't match their file type. Limiting your search to a specific file type will return pages with that file extension, and may return fewer relevant results.

Source:- support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35287

Specialist in SEO Services Delhi, India