How To Get A Top 100000 Rank in Alexa

To get into the top 100,000 in Alexa ranking means your website would be well and truely established and you should be able to easily make a living from it. At this level the Alexa statistics become accurate and will match your google analytics statistics. Advertising companies will welcome you, even chase you for business. This article will explain the do's and don'ts I've worked out over time using trial and error.

Traffic Required for Alexa Milestones

1,000,000 To get in the top 1 million sites you will need around 250-300 unique visitors a day

500,000 To get in the top half million sites you will need around 500-600 unique visitors a day

100,000 To get into the top hundred thousand you  need around 2500 unique visitors a day

Get Inbound Links

Links in to your site are the most important. Its how people get to your site and it also increases your google page rank. And the higher your page rank the more search engine traffic you get. These links need to build slowly over time. Just once or twice a week make some comments in forums and on blogs that are on the same topic as your site. Put your sites link in your signature or in the comment. If you go spamming everyones forum to quickly with links to your site, you may even be penalised by some search engines. So its key to do it slowly and naturally.

Write Great Content

Content is king when it comes to getting the attention of search engines. Never copy and paste other peoples articles, it will just be ignored or even penalise your site. For me articles that contain at least 300 words seem to get the most traffoc. Break the article up into sections like this one has been with titles for each section using header tags. Search engines read the header tags to get a summary of the content. Try to use two images but not too large. Too many pictures that are slow to download also can go against you. And the main benefit of writing good content is that people are more likely to link to you.

Content which is controversial can be good, but be careful not to offend. Content that compares two or three items is good as are reviews of products.

Article Titles

Article titles should be keyword rich and match an exact search phrase if possible. For example, this article is titled "How To Get A Top 100000 Rank in Alexa" which is what I actually searched for in Google myself. Google favors articles when the title is an exact or similar match for a key phrase.

Page Loading Speed

Another metric which helpd generate traffic is how quickly your web page loads. Make sure you use googles webmaster tools and click on the loading speed section for tips on how to make your site faster.

Page Layout

After much experimenting the prefered page layout at the moment seems to be logo on the top left with an easy to navigate menu on the top right. Then content on the left, with all you ads and social media links on a right hand side menu. Then at the bottom have your contact, privacy policy, and terms of use links

How To Build a Tradesman's Website

If you want to build a website that is suited to a tradesman this article will guide you through the steps.

Register a Domain Name

Firstly you need to have a domain name. If your business is in Australia, you will need an ABN and business name that will match or be similar to the .com.au domain name you want to register. For example Jack Smith Electrical Pty Ltd could register jacksmith.com.au or jselectrical.com.au - as long as its close the Australian registrar will allow it.

To register your Australian domain name click here

Get Your Domain Name Hosted

Once your domain name is registered, you will need some web space to hold your website. I recommend our smallest hosting package for tradesman as 25gig of web space is plenty for a small website. Plus you can always upgrade to a higher plan at any stage.

To order the 25 gig web hosting package click here

Build Your Website

We recommend Joomla for small websites. Joomla is a free content management system that can be installed. It basically lets you choose a template for the site, which is the appearance and layout. You can then write your articles and upload pictures and logos.

To install joomla log in to your cpanel by typing www.yourdomain.com.au\cpanel into a web browser. Log in with your username and password given to you when you purchased the hosting package. Click on the fantastico icon and follow the on screen instructions.

Getting Customers To See The Website

If it will be a simple site with a few pages that rarely change, you probably won't get much traffic from search engines. This type of site however is the quickest to set up and easiest to maintain because there's rarely any changes made to it.

If your goal is to get free traffic from search engines, then the site needs to have good content which is unique to other sites and new articles need to be written at least occasionally to show the search engines that the site is current and active.

People Who Like Brands Are Mostly After Discounts

Google has shared some results from recent research that was conducted on consumers which looked at the reasons why people become fans of brands on Facebook. According to these findings, close to half of Facebook users do "like" brands with the other 55% not liking any brands. what was more interesting was the reason that people 'like' brands.

The biggest reason consumers are friending brands is for the possibility of discounts. they made up 25% of the friendlies. Only 18% wanted to show others they support the brand. And 10% said its fun and entertaining following by 8% who want to hear news first.

So its worth keeping in mind when developing a social media strategy, that consumers are mainly looking to receive promotions, with secondary goals of learning new information first and being entertained. I was at first surprised by this. However I guess its human nature to want discounts and so thats what we should be designing facebook pages for.

July 2010 Web Server Survery

In July 2010 there are approximately 205,714,253 websites active on the internet. According to www.netcraft.com the servers they run on are broken down into the following:

Apache running on Linux continues its domination of the online server market mostly because it's free to use, followed secondly by Microsoft's IIS. Google, a late starter in web server software is slowly making ground thanks mostly to it's popular blogger site.

Click here for our Linux Apache Hosting Plans

Click Here for our Microsoft IIS Hosting Plans

How to get a forum started using Kunena Discussbot

Getting a forum started can take a long time if it starts at all. No one really wants to write in a forum if they see no previous posts. However I've come across a plugin called kunena discussbot which works with the forum software called Kunena. It works by allowing users to post comments after articles and those comments are actually handled and stored in the forum. So if you write enough articles and get enough traffic, its an easy way to get a forum started. This particular website is just new so there isn't anything in the forum yet.

I've just installed Kunena 1.6 which is still in Beta version and tried to install the discuss bot however it seems it no longer works with the new version. So I've gone back to Kunena 1.5 and now it's working as it should. See the demo below. Then all you need to do is update the CSS to match the colors of your site and its ready to go.

----update 24/12/10------

Today I installed the latest version of Kunena 1.6 which is no longer in Beta. They also have a native Joomla 1.5 version of the discusbot now which means I can run Joomla in native mode again. Nice. Only downside I can see with this newer plugin is the option to allow guests to comment has been removed. So people need to sign up to the site just to write a comment!! Hope they fix that soon.