Everyday I persistently check to see if Adventures In Hosting’s PageRank or Alexa Ranking has changed. I don’t know of any interval that Alexa updates their ranking, nor does PageRank have an update interval even though there is a way to estimate when next the Pagerank update will occur. I did come across a cool tool that will estimate future PageRank. I do warn you that this tool is a complete estimation and may not be entirely accurate, but it is still neat to see an estimate of what your PageRank will be after spending a ton of time promoting your site. This site is estimated to have a PageRank of 3.4 when the next rankings come out. I think I can live with that for the time being. Make sure that your page has at least 100 backlinks or the tool will not work.
Archive for November, 2007
For those of you who are unfamiliar to Alexa Rankings, it is a statistic that ranks websites against each other based upon the number of hits each site receives. Alexa’s number one site is Yahoo, meaning that this site is the number one most visited site on the web. Google is currently the number 2 most visited site on the web according to Alexa. Adventures In Hosting is ranking in at 3,564,111. Hey I’m working on it. Finally, A2 Hosting’s Alexa ranking has gone up 14,000 spots over the last 8 weeks to about 93,548.
Alexa gathers these statistics with an Alexa toolbar download found on their website. Toolbar downloaders receive valuable information about each site that they visit. This includes related links, 4 month traffic trends and that site’s traffic rank. In return for this information, Alexa collects information based on your surf habits to formulate their rankings. Alexa has the following quote on their page:
Alexa could not exist without the participation of the Alexa Toolbar community. Each member of the community, in addition to getting a useful tool, is giving back. Simply by using the Firefox and IE toolbars each member contributes valuable information about the web, how it is used, what is important and what is not. This information is returned to the community as Related Links, Traffic Rankings and more.
As a web surfer and affiliate manager, I find the information that Alexa relays truly valuable as I can estimate how many other web user’s visit the particular site I view at the current moment. However, this doesn’t come without the following caveats.
1.) I would not suggest downloading this toolbar, even though this goes against everything that I just said. I just don’t like the thought of a company knowing my search habits. I am not a conspiracy theorist nor am I a stereotypical paranoid web user, but I still do not like the idea of a company collecting my web traffic habits. How else will it be powered? Well there are plenty of other people that will help formulate the rankings and since it is powered by the people of Amazon, I don’t see these rankings going away anytime soon.
Even if you don’t download the Alexa toolbar, you can get the ranking information with the Search Status plugin for Firefox. This plugin will give you the PageRank and Alexa Ranking of the page you are viewing. These rankings are a big part of my affiliate application process as well as contacting potential advertising partners because this information is extremely visible.
2.) The second caveat is that Alexa rankings are very easily manipulated as are many web tracking tools that depend on hits. I know this because I have purposely tried to manipulate the statistics to see how credible the Alexa statistics really are. Alexa can be manipulated by downloading the toolbar onto a page and continually refreshing the page so that it is artificially receiving a large number of hits. Why would anyone want to do this? It is a way to boost ad rates as it appears that the page receives a lot more exposure than it actually does. Many sites sell ad space for full weeks and months, thus making it appear that you will get more hits than what will actually take place.
Instead, take Alexa rankings with a grain of salt. I doubt that many people manipulate the statistics, but it does happen. With the Search Status plugin, you get to see the PageRank as well. Evaluate the pages you read with both the PageRank and the Alexa ranking. If a page has a high Alexa ranking but no page rank, there is something to be said about the credibility of that page since PageRank is a measure of that page’s “voice” in the topic that it is discussing. This would mean that many people are reading the page, but it doesn’t have a large voice in the industry.
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If you are looking for the best information regarding the affiliate marketing industry, look no further than Affiliate Tip. This site is written and maintained by Shawn Collins, who has the largest voice for affiliate marketers. Affiliate Tip is also home to the biggest and best affiliate marketing program directory. I just got word yesterday that the A2 Hosting Affiliate Program was accepted into the directory, allowing us to display our program to the Affiliate Tip audience. Check out our listing here.
In short, I have no idea when Google visits your site. It varies for every site, depending on a number of factors including PageRank, the size of the page, how old the page is and in my opinion the most important factor is how often it is updated. The update factor is the most important because just like any person that likes to read the news, they want the most up to date news possible. They are not going to go to your site if the news is 2 weeks old. Neither will Google. Though I don’t know the next time Google will visit your site, I do know when the last time was.
To check, your site must be at least indexed by Google. All you need to do is go to Google and search for your site’s URL. For example, I searched http://adventuresinhosting.com. Below your site’s listing it should say both “Cached” and “Similar Pages”. Click the Cached link. This page is what Google saw the last time they spidered your site. At the very top of the page, it will say the date that the page was last visited by Google. On this cached Adventures In Hosting page, you can clearly see that the last time the page was visited at this time was November 7th.
So how do you make sure that Google spiders your site often? Keep updating it. When I first started this blog about 2 months ago, I noticed it would take 2 weeks for Google to visit it. Eventually that time was cut in half by a week since I kept writing updates. This last visit was just a mere 2 days since the previous one. My advice, update your site and Google will come.
Yesterday I spoke of how to promote your website. One of my suggestions was to submit your site to free directories as this increases your exposure as well as your back links, theoretically causing you to move up in your search engine rankings. I stumbled upon a web directory of web directories, The web directory is alphabetized as well as broken down into whether submissions is free and if not, the cost to submit your site into each individual directory. I would not pay to be listed in a directory unless I felt it was going to be extremely beneficial, mainly measured by the directory’s alexa ranking and PageRank. Directories get free content from you and in my eye’s that should be enough to be listed on their site. There are plenty of free directories and those that just require a reciprocal link, which I don’t entirely agree with either.
I figured it was long over due for me to share some search engine optimization tips as well as key web promotion ideas with you. Enjoy!
1. CONTENT! – I cannot preach this enough. Make sure to update your site with original, current content on a regular basis. The search engines will love you. It will become a mutual love.
2. Name your page - <TITLE>Put your page title here</TITLE> and <HEAD>put that tag somewhere in here</HEAD>
3. Write a
4. Intro – Make sure to have a keyword rich, but well written intro on your site. Really focus on your first 100 words.
5. Submit your site to the major search engines
6. Name images on your site appropriately – Since search engines don’t see images and only the image names, it is important to name the images on your page something appropriate. For example, if you have a pet shop located in
7 Submit your site to the major directories – Submitting to DMOZ is a must to highly optimize your site, but you might as well submit to Yahoo Directory while you are at it.
8. Properly name each page – If you are adding a page about kittens to your site, name the page “Kittens” not “Page 1”. This will be much more helpful when search engines spider your site, thus making your site even more keyword rich.
9. Submit your site to relevant directories- Let Google help you with this. I needed to submit this site to web hosting directories so I searched “web hosting directories” within Google. Do the same for your site depending on the topic of the site. I stay away from sites I have to pay for and that ask for reciprocal links because I notice many will never list your site and merely enjoy the PageRank vote you just gave them. The content you give to directories should be enough for them to list you.
10. Keyword Link Backs – Anytime you get the opportunity to link back to your page from another site, make sure to use major keywords in the text of the link.
On Monday, the ladies and gents of A2Hosting met for our monthly meeting. The majority of employees work remotely from home, including myself working once a week in our office, but we all meet up once a month for a meeting of minds at Grizzly Peak in
Among other conversations, I spoke with one our support technicians regarding the A2 Hosting affiliate program. He told me that he logs into his affiliate account everyday to see if he has made a sale because he has yet to make one and is anxious to do so. As a word of note, you will receive an email if you make a sale so you don’t necessarily have to constantly refresh your sales statistics. I encouraged him as I would any affiliate that has yet to get off the so called “affiliate schnide”. Keep updating your site, keep writing product reviews and keep promoting your website. Most importantly make sure to have fun because I strongly believe that affiliate marketing should be a fun endeavor. If you do these things, that first affiliate sale will happen.
If you have yet to make a sale, at least you know that you are not on your own. One of our very own employees hasn’t made a sale yet. If you keep at it, it will happen. As a little boost to my co-employee, I figured I would give a shout out to his website below.
Jemmille.com is the place to find the best tech news, tips and the latest scoops on what is hot (and what is not) in technology and culture. Information contained on the site is based on jemmille’s personal knowledge of computer technology and trends coupled with information gathered from hundreds of sites on a daily basis. I spend countless hours reading, digesting, and locating the most interesting technologies and cultural curiosities. I also write about what I read and watch - mostly books and programs on technology, history, and geography and politics.
One of the statistics that I check regularly is PageRank. In short, PageRank is a measure of the amount of high quality web pages that link to your web page, designated from 1-10. Generally the higher the PageRank, the more exposure your site will receive because it is perceived as having a strong web “voice”. Not all blog creators want a lot of exposure for their blog, but I do. I want to scream at the top of blog voice for web users to come and use A2 Hosting as their web hosting company as they will be very please with their service. So I have spent a lot of time promoting this site and trying to get high quality back links to this page, which as I mentioned above is a large part of the PageRank equation.
Unfortunately for myself and many other blog writers, there is not a set schedule of when the PageRanks are updated. I did dig up a site that has a calendar of when the PageRank were updated, so it is possible to estimate when the next ranking will be released. Take a look at this PageRank calendar. According to the ranking, the last update was 13 days ago, so it will be awhile before the next ranking is released. The last update before that was 6 months earlier. Yikes! Looks like I am stuck with a PageRank of 0 for awhile! It appears that the updates average about every 2 ½ months. I would estimate that we will see the next PageRank around mid January 2008.
Yesterday I posted my first set of A2 Hosting advertisements on a number of forums. Forum advertising is a great way to get free exposure for your site. This goes for blogs or any type of site. To keep a certain level of professionalism and to keep a high level of user experience, many blogs have distinct rules regarding advertisements in forum posts. Notice the ad found in this A2 Hosting posting. To post in ad in this forum, I had to make 15 posts within the forum, post only in the web hosting offers section and I can only post an ad once a week in that forum. Below is the forum post that I am referring to.
I wanted to take a moment to introduce A2 Hosting to this forum’s audience in case you are unfamiliar with us. We are a full service hosting company supporting the latest internet technologies, but I will get into that in a moment. We offer shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting, and managed dedicated hosting packages. Our motto at A2 Hosting is “Leading Edge Hosting. Exceptional Support.” We are the hosting company that will give you the dependability that you want and the reliability that you need.
What set’s us apart from the competition? A number of things, but let’s focus on two of the characteristics that our customers rave about. First, you are always going to have the latest web hosting technologies when you are one of our customers. Whether it be PHP 5.2, MYSQL 5, PostgreSQL 8 , or the latest Ruby On Rails, we support the latest and greatest versions. Secondly, our superior support capability is committed to making sure our customers are always successful and satisfied. We admit it, you may pay a bit more with us, but isn’t it worth it for peace of mind and being content with your web hosting provider? We have a solid reputation as a reliable developer friendly hosting provider who has been in business for over 4 years. If it is price you are concerned about, we have an exclusive coupon available for forum users.
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