Blasting over 1mio on Alexa thanks to the search engines
Since yesterday LEADSExplorer has obtained a ranking of 962.000 on Alexa. This means that there are about 1mio website having more traffic than we do. And at least 160mio websites that have less traffic.
Inaccurate Alexa
Even though the data from Alexa is not accurate, it shows:
- The trend of whether your traffic is growing or not
- A competitor having a ranking 0.5mio lower, will also have less traffic.
Although Alexa is inaccurate, it is good enough for what we use it:
- To know how the competition is doing
- To check upon leads and potential customers
This chart is from SillyJokes.
How did we achieve this?
We did this by not:
- Advertising
- Participating in trade shows
- Spending any money on advertising or PR
- Spending money on directory listings.
We just have:
- Paid for the domain name and the hosting.
- Submitted our link to many free directory listings
- Written content (a lot) for the website
- Written articles and posted them in different versions on free article websites
- Created a few PowerPoint presentations and published them
- Written a few ‘White Papers’ and submitted them on free syndication websites
- Become winner on Red Herring, but that mainly influenced the number of visitors on Engago Technologies.
- Applied at three more contests, that only listed the company name.
SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was done in house with very limited knowledge about it.
- We just looked at keywords
- We have chosen the url of web pages more carefully (the last 5 months).
There are many tips on SEO available on the Internet.
Submitting to free directories
We never used reciprocal links as this is too much work and might even turn negative.
Only a few directories or listings actually bring visitors.
Thus in the end free directory submission is not worth the effort for generating visits.
On the other hand these entries get indexed too, so it should help the SERP of the website.
Article writing
Writing articles generates little traffic.
And in some cases the articles get copied into blogs, bringing hardly any traffic.
White Papers
It is rather unclear if these really have brought any visitors as the free white paper syndications have themselves little number of visitors.
We can imagine that well renowned paid white paper syndications can bring traffic, but at a high cost.
Presentations
We have made a few PowerPoint presentations available online.
As there is no direct link from the presentation to the website it hard to define how many visitors actually came from these presentations.
We know we have quite a few direct hits to the website, but they can come from anywhere.
Just counting the number of views of the presentations is not correct neither as the website provides a link to these presentations to view them online.
Website content
The content on the website was the main driver to arrive at a ranking around 1.5mio
The content of the blog pushed LEADSExplorer over the 1mio.
The blog has a post almost everyday.
The blog is on the same domain name as the website.
Coincidently on Technorati the blog attained position 1.8mio (jumped from 2.5mio in just one day) and received authority 2 (yesterday only 1).
We believe Technorati is lagging far behind and very inaccurate.
Competitors
Some of the competitors rank lower, the larger part ranks higher.
Most, if not all, competitors have the ‘log on’ to their web service on their website.
This generates a significant amount of daily traffic as several times a day the same people of all their customers log on: thus they visit the website.
This increases significantly their position on Alexa.
Conclusion
If you provide content, then Google (or search engines) is your friend, giving you a high SERP on many keywords and keyword phrases.
Never forget:
You need to feed the search engines (mainly Google) continuously. If not the number of visitors will start dropping. Yes we are a bit Googlecentric.
The rank is good and it will keep on improving . Last week I got close to 320,000 and it is still improving .
We forgot to mention:
The domain name was registered on July 30, 2007 thus less than 12 months ago.
Since about 11 months there is content on the website.
But the reality is that internet marketing and any other marketing for that matter, is the life blood of any business. But your advantage on the internet is huge, cause of the low cost and ease. (you can do it yourself) But you still have to work hard and put time into it, and this is the problem, no one wants to work….and we all know that nothing is for free in this world. (usually)
Actually, I’m wrong, there’s tons of stuff for free on the internet, and you can also get a ton of traffic to your site for free, if you know how to play the game, work hard, and know how to market yourself.
There’s tons of tricks and tips and I try to learn one everyday.
petes2cents.com
[...] visitors rising. Alexa has ranked LEADSExplorer website now at 500,000 (497,914). Thus in just over 3 months we gained 500,000 [...]
[...] current Alexa ranking: 497,914 When on July 11 it was only ranked 962,000 We know Alexa is inaccurate. Still between 1,000,000 and 500,000 there is a significant [...]
[...] visitors rising. Alexa has ranked LEADSExplorer website now at 500,000 (497,914). Thus in just over 3 months we gained 500,000 [...]
[...] current Alexa ranking: 497,914 When on July 11 it was only ranked 962,000 We know Alexa is inaccurate. Still between 1,000,000 and 500,000 there is a significant [...]
Great post. Words and online copy will remain the main fuel for search engines and as such will also remain the focus for marketers.