Ok, you've spent time and energy building a great website but nobody knows about it. And, try as you might, you just can't get listed in the search engines or your page rankings are so low that nobody's ever going to scroll that far down the search results list to see your site. What do you do?
This is a problem that plagues many webmasters. It's a problem that this website suffered from. For several months, all this site consisted of was a single page with some information I'd cobbled together from my experience of creating and marketing my other websites. I really didn't pay this site much attention.
How Big Is The Internet?
I don't know if anyone knows (if you do, maybe you'd let me know) but back in 2002, it was estimated that there were 36 million websites. In 2004 that rose to over 170 million!. Today, your guess is as good as mine! Whatever the number, it's a huge one in which to get noticed. Ok, you're particular subject or niche will filter that down somewhat, but there's no escaping the fact that the better your search engine ranking, the more visitors you'll get.
This website languished at an Alexa ranking of 1,537,743 and o Google PR of 0 for months because I wasn't doing anything with it. It's the poorest ranking of all my websites. But it reflects the site's then lack of activity and content. At the end of May 2004, I made some modifications to the page content, the first change I'd made in months. On June 3, Alexa recognised something had happened and the ranking changed to 1,505,406, up by about 32,000.
I did nothing more with the page until June 11th, so the ranking slipped again, this time to 1,506,487, down a 1,000 or so. A couple of tweaks later, it was back up to 1,505,238 on the 18th. On the 19th, I decided to completely revamp the website and turn it into one that is content rich, even though at the time, there weren't that many pages on the site. At time of writing, it's June 25th, so the revamped site is only 5 days old.
But on June 23rd, the Alexa ranking had jumped to 1,331,977, an increase of some 173,000.
I'm using this website as an experiment and a challenge, putting all of the knowledge I've learned over the last couple of years to use and I aim to get it into the top 1% of internet websites. That means getting an Alexa ranking of 500,000 or less. Even at a ranking of 1,331,977, this site is in the top 3% of websites!
I used to not pay much attention to Google Pagerank as they change their ranking algorithms so often, or someimes so radically, that pageranks can change radically overnight. I've seen pages drop from a PageRank of 6 to 0 on popular sites and it's led to a lot of upset people. Alexa is more consistent and a higher ranking with them means your page is climbing.
Now, at the start of 2007, this website has an Alexa Ranking of 193,947 and a Google PR of 4. That's not bad at all. This isn't my biggest website (that would be my Night Sky Observer amateur astronomy website but, paradoxically, my NSO site has a lower Alexa Ranking but a higher Google PR of 6. Night Sky Observer is a more popular site, has many more visitors and many more site linking to it than this site. That seems to be better reflected by the Google PR rating.
These days, I put more stock in Google's rating than Alexa's. But, that said, any website that has an Alexa ranking of 500,000 or above is doing very well indeed.
All my websites have been designed to be content rich and to have a good number of outgoing and incoming links. As of May. 2007, these are my site rankings:
| Website | Google PR | Alexa Rank |
| This Website | 4 | 314,558 |
| Night Sky Observer | 6 | 371,731 |
| Great Landscape Photography | 5 | 1,826,047 |
| Cat-Oholics.com | 5 | 1,599,747 |
| ScoopQuest | 4 | 2,634,599 |
| Las Vegas Expeditions | 3 | 4,215,680 |
| She's Getting Married | 3 | n/a |
| Essential Blogging Guide | 3 | 1,919,332 |
| HDTV Home User | 3 | n/a |
| About Sky Diving | 0 | n/a |
Conclusions
From the above table I can draw one definitive conclusion. The sites with the lowest Alexa Rankings (this site, NSO and ScoopQuest) all heavily use RSS feeds to keep content constantly updating. So Alexa seems to put great emphasis on changing content.
Google puts more emphasis on the quality of content. The more content the better. Although continuously changing content is still good (i.e. via RSS feeds). Site longevity is another factor.
The Night Sky Observer site has been online since 1997, Cat-oholics since 2004 and Great Landscape Photography since 2005. This website has been online since 2004. ScoopQuest was created last year. Getting a PR of 4 in only a few months is pretty good and it's a website that I don't do much with.
There is one caveat to be aware of when using RSS feeds. You must build your website using PHP rather than Javascript. PHP renders webpages to HTML in real time so any news stories from PHP RSS feeds get incorporated into your webpage. Thsi doesn't happen with Javascript RSS feeds. The search engines merely see a bit of static Javascript code and not the stories the Javascript is displaying.
Javascript RSS feeds may be great for giving your visitors constantly updating content, but they're no good for boosting your search engine rankings.
With that in mind, I'm off to build some more RSS fes PHP websites!
Here are four websites I created in Feb. 2007. Their rankings are virtually non-existent (as expected), but I'll track how they change in the coming months on this page. All the websites are build using PHP and all incorporate RSS feeds:
| Website | Google PR | Alexa Rank |
| Essential Blogging Guide | 0 | 1,941,651 |
| Las Vegas Expeditions | 0 | 4,446,686 |
| She's Getting Married | 0 | No Data |
| About Sky Diving | 0 | No Data |
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