What do they mean to you?  I’m never sure how much weight to give to third party rankings like Alexa and Google PageRank.  Let’s review…

Interesting… isn’t it?  I know that it’s a higher ranking than another site of mine, FoodAskew.net, which has a ranking of 1,147,532.  To give you some scale, Google has an Alexa ranking of 2, AffiliateSummit.com has a ranking of 104,661, and Facebook has a ranking of 5.

Alexa ranks all the sites on the web based on their traffic and that’s how the ranking comes up.  I guess I should be happy in the range I’m in, but what can be done to increase your ranking?  More traffic, as far as I can tell.

Page Rank is another beast all together.  According to Wikipedia,

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

Much more complicated, and for the life of me I cannot figure out how to boost my page rank.  I know by checking that my page rank is 0.  I can’t understand it considering that I have a decent number of inbound links as well as outbound links that aren’t affiliate links.  Perhaps it’s because most the links are direct post links and not to just the domain?  Someone who knows more about this has yet to tell me.

So how much weight should be put on these numbers?  Different people across the web say different things.  I like to believe that as long as I’m putting out good content, it doesn’t matter.  I focus on bringing more traffic to my site right now because the more eyes that see it, the more likely it is that they’ll come back.

But, I’m far from being an expert on this.  What’s your opinion?

To find your own Alexa Ranking, go to www.Alexa.com. Use this tool to check your Google PR:

Check Page Rank of any web site pages instantly:

This free page rank checking tool is powered by Page Rank Checker service

Yes that’s right – I have not abandoned the Free Toolsday feature.  Lots of things have come up, and I’ve been a bit uninspired, but like a flash it hit me what the best tool to feature today would be.  One that can make you money!

ScratchBack, a Jim Kukral project, is a great way for your readers and fellow bloggers to both show you some love and advertise their own blogs or websites.  It’s free to join and set up, with about 15 different stock designs for your widget.  You can also design your own using the guidelines from the website and they’ll hook it up with a nice custom one.  Obviously you can see over there ——> that I haven’t had the time or focus to do another custom design as I once had!

This is how it works: you put the widget on your site.  A reader comes by and decides that they want to tip you and get a link up all in one swoop.  So they click the widget, pay the tip to ScratchBack (YOU set how much of a tip you want!) and then ScratchBack pays you 90% of the tip (they have to keep the lights on, afterall).

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="540" caption="How it Works"][/caption]

You have the power to decide how much of a tip you want (the minimum is $5), how you want links to be bumped, if you want links auto approved, and more.  it’s one of the better widgets out there since it rewards you for your content while allowing other readers to promote their stuff as well.  It’s free to join if you just want to check it out and you’ll almost never get any emails from them – solicitation or otherwise. It’s also a great traffic source for you to go out there & reinvest – put your links on other blogs that employ ScratchBack!

I’m a big believer – so ask me if you have questions!

Inbound Link:

• A link to a particular page from elsewhere on the Internet.  Inbound links are important to SEO because many search engines’ rankings are at least partially based on the amount of inbound links.

Your break from the glossary is over!  Inbound links are tricky as you usually have no influence on whether you get them or not.  A good tip is to submit your site to directories at the beginning to start building some inbound links, and make sure your content is good.  If you have excellent content, more blogs and other websites within your niche will want to link to yours.

____
Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine