I have been doing a lot of reading about Alexa rank lately, and I was curious how I might be able to lower my Alexa ranking. While most webmasters would probably agree that the Alexa ranking is not very accurate, it does play a role in how some websites are valued. A good example is Text Link Ads, where Alexa rank helps to determine the price for selling links from your site.

As an experiment to see if I could lower the Alexa rank of three separate websites I added an Alexa widget to each site and recorded the Alexa rank from August 8, 2007 for one site and from August 23, 2007 for two other sites. Below is the data for the three sites.

Date	Website 1	Website 2	Website 3
8/8/2007	556,017
8/15/2007	473,705
8/20/2007	445,224
8/23/2007	423,651	643,353	1,733,470
8/28/2007	401,288	670,621	1,736,471
8/29/2007	392,310	650,306	1,647,715
9/2/2007	392,128	644,207	1,646,994
9/7/2007	378,928	612,253	1,519,212
9/10/2007	378,928	608,857	1,442,110
9/12/2007	354,528	566,842	1,441,124
9/22/2007	344,909	566,842	1,441,124
9/24/2007	342,354	554,282	1,351,596
9/27/2007	343,567	529,555	1,281,987
10/2/2007	349,609	519,612	1,152,594
Drop in Alexa Rank	-206,408	-123,741	-580,876

Overall there was a decrease in the Alexa ranking by adding the Alexa widget to the sites. While I dislike adding additional items to websites that will slow down a page load, placing an Alexa widget on your site might be worth considering if you are thinking of selling direct advertising or other text link sales. With a little clever CSS and HTML the visitor does not even need to know the Alexa widget is there, yet the visit will be counted by Alexa.

I am going to keep the Alexa widget on the three sites until Christmas and see if the sites Alexa ranking continues to slowly drop. One of the sites is fairly new, launching only in June 2007, so it might gain more traffic by December and drop more significantly.

I, like most people, love contests for free stuff. They sucker draw me in every time. If you are running a tech website or blog it can be very easy to come up with ideas for prizes to give away, simply look for the latest computer gadget or addon that grabs your attention. If you like it you can bet that others would love to win one as well. John over at SiteFever did just that. He is offering up one Western Digital 1 terabyte external hard drive as a prize and the rules are simple. Write a post with a link back to the contest saying what you would do with a 1 terabyte external hard drive.

Of course you don’t always have to spend money to offer prizes. Smashing Magazine recently ran an Anniversary contest where the prizes were donated by many different organizations and businesses. That post alone had over 1800 comments!

Problogger is also getting ready to celebrate the birthday of Problogger and had a call for donations of prizes. A quick add up of the prizes was over $35,000 USD.

Of course if you are just starting out you will probably have to find the money yourself to fund the prize, but if you can get the word out, holding a contest will help you gain more links back to your website or blog. It might be some of the cheapest advertising you can get with better returns than most pay per click campaigns.

Oh and to answer the question of what I would do with a 1 terabyte external hard drive? Whatever the hell I want!

Every blog I visited last night and today, including Shoemoney, Dosh Dosh, Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim and John Chow, had something written about Blog Rush.

What is it? Blog Rush is a new javascript widget that you can place on your blog to display the latest headlines from other blogs that are in the same category as your blog. You get to display your latest post on other blogs for every page view of the widget on your blog. Of course that is not all Blog Rush is, it also has an affiliate program built in so for every person that signs up under your referral you will also get more displays from your referral page views.

It sounds great doesn’t it? A great way of getting the word out there about your blog and displaying your latest headline. Since everyone was talking about it I had to check this out for myself. I signed up using my Video Rambler blog. I tried several categories and placed the widget in the template and republished. I then went to check to see what kinds of headlines I was getting. I was not impressed. Check out the headline of the second story? I clicked through to see the content of that story. Not the kind of site I want to be linking too. Perhaps I have to high of standards, but I don’t need to advertise that on a site that I know I have kids visiting. The widgets I have seen on blogs similar in content to the LGR Webmaster Blog has been not bad. I suppose it might just be the categories I choose for Video Rambler. Needless to say the widget was off of Video Rambler as fast as it went on.

Giving it some thought since I tried the Blog Rush widget I have a few things for people to consider before trying it out.

• Currently they only have one layout for the widget. Hopefully they will come out with more options for the widget so people can make it blend in with their blogs more.
• How are they going to keep the spam blogs out? There seems to be no check at all when I signed up. You could end up linking to blogs that you really don’t want to promote.
• Do you really want/need another widget on your blog?
• There is no guarantee of the amount of traffic you are going to get, if any.
• There needs to be a better way to filter out blogs and posts from appearing in your widget. There is a filter that you can use to block certain keywords and url keywords from appearing, but I could not get it to work when I tried to block certain keywords.
• If your blog receives little traffic your headlines will not be shown very often. You might be better off building links and taking part in others blogs to help build traffic before placing the widget. If you already have a high traffic blog, do you need this widget?

Given some of these current issues with the widget if you feel it is right for your blog you can sign up at Blog Rush. I will be interested to hear other people experiences with it, but I think I will leave it off of my blogs until the filtering is better. It might be worth joining to be a part of the affiliate program, just to gain some referrals and some page views through your referrals to judge if it is worth placing on your blog.

Webmasters and bloggers are always after more links. The more links the better your ranking should be in the search engines and hopefully the more people will visit your website or blog and take what ever action you want then to take. Whether you want them to buy something, read your wonderfully witty posts on your blog, or take part in your latest social networking website. We all need links. Bloggers that have been at it a little while often follow Technorati and they know that their blog ranking is determined by how many blogs link back to them. You want to get your blog into the top 100, get hundreds and thousands of links.

Want to know a secret of getting tons of links back to your website or blog? Are you ready for it? Give something away that people want. Not really a secret right? Businesses have been doing this forever. McDonald’s is famous for giving something away for free to get people to come back. They started selling kids happy meals with toys for a reason. My son does not like to go to McDonalds for the food, at least he never eats it when we are there. He wants to go there to get the latest toy that comes with his lunch. We continue to go to McDonald’s because they give away something for free that my son wants.

A good example of this are website themes. There are hundreds if not thousands of people out there designing website themes for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and even plain HTML/CSS themes. Why do people take time out of their busy lives to design a website theme and then just give it away? Simple, they want that link back to their own website every time the theme is used.

Here is an example for you. Michael Martine runs a blog called Better Blogging with Michael Martine. I don’t read his blog very often, but there is something to learn by looking at the blog reactions for Better Blogging with Michael Martine. Notice anything about the links back to his blog? They are almost all links back from a theme he designed. All of those links place his blog in the top 100 according to Technorati, although you don’t see him listed on the top 100 list. He has designed a WordPress theme(s) that people like and use and in return he gets links back to his blog from every single blog that uses the theme. Not bad for giving something away. I am sure there are many examples of people or businesses gaining huge amounts of backlinks by giving away something.

How does this help you? Not everyone can create a popular WordPress theme, but I am sure if you think about it for a little while you will be able to come up with something that you can give away that people will want that can help you get those links.

I would love to know what you come up with. It would be great to make another post of all the possible things people could give away to help create more links back to their website or blog.

A great video on how to use del.icio.us. del.icio.us is one of my favourite social bookmarking sites. A common problem with del.icio.us and other sites that rely on tags is the lack of any kind of controlled vocabulary for tags. I don’t have a degree in library science but I have that problem just on my own account. Sites that are actually similar or related have different tags assigned to them and make the bookmarks hard to find later on. Multiply that by millions of people using different tags for the same website, along with misspellings and the number of tags and websites can in some ways become chaos. Makes me appreciate librarians a lot more.

A popular thing for blogs to do these days is to run a review for backlinks program. Usually the programs run something like this: review the blog running the program and get a backlink from that blog to your review. The selling point for these reviews is that the blog doing the review will get a link back from a more popular blog, either a higher PageRank, and/or high traffic blog. The question is, are these backlinks valuable for the blogs doing the review?

One of the more popular review my blog for backlinks programs is John Chow’s “Review My Blog & Get A Free Linkback“. He has been running the program since December 2006 and is currently up to batch 76. His site is currently ranked as a PageRank six and reviews are posted in increments of 10 at a time. At John’s current rate of posting the review post might be on the home page for seven days and then it will only be found in the blog archive. This gives you seven days on the front page of a fairly high traffic blog. Being on the front page of a PageRank six website for only seven days will be useless as far as flowing PageRank, it simply is not long enough. The value will only be the traffic that one can expect from being on the front page of a busy blog.
I am sure there would be a pretty good traffic spike from being on the front page of a busy blog like John Chow’s, but that traffic might be even better if the links to the blogs contained small reviews of the blog that did the review to help peak interest in each review.

The very first post of “review my blog posts” on John Chow is a PageRank three, and the PageRank of the review pages varies from unranked to five. If you are lucky enough to be on one of the review pages with high PageRank you will be sharing PageRank with the other ten links, not to mention all of the other links on the sidebar. I checked the PageRank of the reviews from some of the higher PageRank review posts and the average PageRank of the reviews was one! Most of the reviews were often unranked, and these were reviews that have been on the interent long enough that they should have received PageRank. That tells me that whatever PageRank value that is flowing to the review is fairly small. Do review posts on blogs get much traffic after they are off the front page? I have no way of knowing but I suspect that the number of visitors from the reviewed blog is fairly small after leaving the home page. There is simply no reason for people to read those posts and follow through to your blog, unless you are doing what I did today.

Review me for a backlink programs work for the blog offering the program, since they get links to their blog using the anchor text they want, but for the blog doing the review there appears to be little value, except the traffic spike from being on the home page of a popular blog for a short time. Long term you would be better off being active leaving comments and participating in other blogs than doing a one time review. Review my blog for a backlink programs could be made better for the reviewers by implementing some of these ideas:

• Limit the number of review backlinks from a review post to five or less.
• Provide a short preview of the review/blog along with the link. This will give the post linking to the review more content and provide some value to readers and reviewers. This might actually make the review link back post worth visiting.
• Offer a link back for a longer period of time from the home page or site wide to the reviews. Best would probably be three months, but at least one month would be better. Reviews might have to be done less to provide the greater value to reviewers.

These are just ideas I had off the top of my head. Of course this goes against the whole point of most review my blog for a backlink programs. Since if you actually did this you would be putting your readers and reviewers first and yourself second. Perhaps I will have to think about starting a program and doing these things.

Building links is part of every webmaster’s daily work. Thanks to Jennifer over at Search Engine Guide for a great how to on how to use blog search engines to build links. She walks you through how to use Technorati to find blogs that are talking about topics relevant to your blog.

The list does not get any bigger than this one.

The Enormous list of Linkbuilding tips, articles and resources

Some fantastic resources on the list, some that I might avoid, but overall a great list. There is hours of reading for you to do on link building. I know I will have to work my way through the list later tonight.

I was doing some surfing last night and dropped in on the “Succesful Blog” by Liz Strauss. She had a great post about a smart banner that takes your rss feed and creates an animated gif that you can use on top blog sites and in other places where you need a banner. Liz links to Blogosquare where you can get the complete instructions to make one for yourself.

Here is one I did up late last night quickly for my Video Rambler blog.

What a great idea for a banner! It presents the latest headlines from your blog, and is sure to catch peoples attention to bring in even more visitors.

In the rush to embrace new technology and new ways of communicating we often abandon the well established communication methods that people are used too. For example, people know how to use email. Everyone from grandparents to little children use email. It is still one of the most used services on the Internet and probably will be for a very long time, even with the problems of spam.

With that in mind it can be a very useful promotion device to still provide people with an easy method to forward your website information to their friends, family and coworkers by email. This blog for example has an email this icon and link on every post so people can quickly send the link to others. On other blogs I help with or publish the email this link is used quite often, and from the statistics email referrers account for just over 1% of the incoming traffic.

Another email option that you can provide, if you have an rss feed, is the ability for people to subscribe to your rss feed be email. This weblog uses Feedburner for that feature, but there are other services out there that provide that service as well. People that subscribe by email are sent an email archive of the latest posts from your blog once a day. This allows them to read the latest posts from your weblog with very little effort.

Website promotion by email is still a very useful tool to provide your visitors. It gives them an easy way to spread the word about your website to others, and is a great method to stay in touch with your regular visitors.