As with all website development to increase over time the TOP method has to be developing quality content, this will by its very nature attract and maintain an audience as opposed to artificially increasing your Alexa rank, so try to work the two together.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension. Then set your site as your homepage – every day you get one visit, this has to be the first step.

2. Put the Alexa rank widget on your website. Show you support Alexa and take it seriously, how do you expect others to if you don’t? – I have….

3. Get other using the Alexa toolbar, friends, followers website visitors and link to it so they can clearly see what this entails.

4. Ask these friends to review and rate your Alexa profile, mine is here can you add a review?

5. Add something on your site about Alexa, write a blog post – if its good and helpful people with link to it and this will send you targeted traffic.

6. Keep up the comments on other blogs’ forums etc, I wrote a post all about this here. Why leave Blog Comments and What you get out of it.

These are simple Alexa strategies that anyone can do and they will make a difference to your Alexa ranking. The end goal has to be more visitors to your home page and then interacting with the site. So with this in mind I make no apologies for again mentioning the need for quality content, if you create a positive experience for your users they will return.

Anyone got any more tips to add for improving their Alexa rankings?

The first thing to remember is that ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ (or SEO for short) is not an exact science, there are things that we can do (and you) to try and influence the position of your website in search engine rankings but at the end of the day it’s down to Google (or Yahoo, or MSN etc) and not us to decide which site goes where in the listings. There are over 100 different factors that the search engines take into account when deciding the position of a web site, a good web developer will generally concentrate on the most important of those factors. Many of the things that influence the rankings are not even visible to the average user of the website. Things like page titles, hidden meta data, number of inbound links to the site etc. have a very large influence but don’t worry a good web developer will take care of this part for you.

As you may or may not know, the actual written content of your website is important and this is where you can actually help towards the SEO of the site. Simply write your content (or use a skilled copywriter) to ensure a number of your ‘Keywords and Key-phrases’ are used throughout. These are the important words on your site that you want to get found for in Google for searches and also similar and related searches. A keyword might be something like ‘jewellery’, whilst Key-phrases are usually a combination of 2, 3 or 4 keywords, for example ‘sterling silver jewellery’. Ideally we want the key-phrases to be in the same order that someone might actually type them into Google. Here are some basic guidelines for the descriptions.

• Remember that the content is for end user and should be clear to them.
• Use keywords and key-phrases frequently to increase search engine positions for these. (This makes the page seem more relevant to the search engines for people searching for these words and phrases).
• However don’t over use them, so that it doesn’t read well or just looks weird, make sure it flows and sounds natural.
• Keep the descriptions relevant to product.
• Be direct. Use short sentences. Break up the text with line breaks. Search engines don’t actually bother reading punctuation or line breaks but for users, it’s easier to read if it’s spaced out and not one big chunk of text.
• Use lists if appropriate; these are concise and easy to read.
• Don’t be afraid to repeat a little bit to get your point across, this could mean summarising with a final sentence or paragraph containing important keywords. However, it’s important to ensure that it doesn’t look weird or out of place.
• Up to 300 words on the page is ideal for most products and services. If there’s not much to say then it’s not always good to put something there just for the sake of it.

You can gain good website traffic through article marketing simply by having a well written article in these article directories, and here are my top 5 tips for great article submission.

1. Choose a good Ezine directory, there are lots around you only need to Google ‘Ezine’ and you get over 10 million results.

2. When you have chosen a directory then register yourself as Ezine author, its easy to do and once you have chose the directory you want you need to create in effect your profile that hold more info about you, you can see mine here.

3. Create lots of articles, I know this is pretty self explanatory but the more you create on lots of different topics the more you will be listed in search engines for these topics. Don’t forget to proof read all your articles, you don’t want one going live that’s just gibberish.

4. You must use keywords and keyphrases in your articles in accordance with your overall SEO strategy, don’t forget also to include these keywords in the article title also.

5. Keep at it, it’s easy after the first flourish to stop submitting articles but you really need to keep at it and keep submitting so you build up a nice little ‘group’ of articles.

Generating traffic through article marketing is relatively easy with the help of the Ezine article directory, I have 10 Active articles, resulting in 916 views and that is in 6 months, not a bad result I think. Just follow these steps and you won’t go far wrong and you will begin to generate serious traffic for your site.

Have a look at mine here: http://ezinearticles.com/?expert_bio=Alistair_Gleave

The first thing to remember is that ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ (or SEO for short) is not an exact science, there are things that we can do to try and influence the position in the site in the rankings but at the end of the day it’s down to Google (or Yahoo, or MSN etc) and not us to decide which site goes where. There are over 100 different factors that the search engines take into account when deciding the position of a web site, we concentrate on the most important of those factors. Many of the things that influence the rankings are not even visible to the average user of the website. Things like page titles, hidden meta data, number of inbound links to the site etc. have a very large influence but don’t worry we will take care of this part for you.

As you may know, the content of the site is important and this is where you can help towards the SEO of the site. Keywords and Key-phrases These are the important words on your site that we want to get found for in Google for searches and also similar and related searches. A keyword might be something like ‘jewellery’, whilst Key-phrases are usually a combination of 2, 3 or 4 keywords, for example ‘sterling silver jewellery’. Ideally we want the key-phrases to be in the same order that someone might actually type them into Google. Here are some basic guidelines for the descriptions.

• Remember that the content is for end user and should be clear to them.
• Use keywords and key-phrases frequently to increase search engine positions for these. (This makes the page seem more relevant to the search engines for people searching for these words and phrases).
• However don’t over use them, so that it doesn’t read well or just looks weird, make sure it flows and sounds natural.
• Keep the descriptions relevant to product.
• Be direct. Use short sentences. Break up the text with line breaks. Search engines don’t actually bother reading punctuation or line breaks but for users, it’s easier to read if it’s spaced out and not one big chunk of text.
• Use lists if appropriate; these are concise and easy to read.
• Don’t be afraid to repeat a little bit to get your point across, this could mean summarising with a final sentence or paragraph containing important keywords. However, it’s important to ensure that it doesn’t look weird or out of place.
• Up to 300 words on the page is ideal for most products and services. If there’s not much to say then it’s not always good to put something there just for the sake of it.