The first goal of SEO is to draw traffic to a site. But traffic
is drawn to sites that are good. So let's take a look at two perspectives on
what kind of content draws traffic.
First, a web site worth practicing SEO upon should be a worthy
beneficiary: a site with content that at least theoretically has the ability to
draw traffic.
Second, one SEO techniquein the absence of this worthy
contentis to create it from scratch. So bear in mind that creating content to
draw traffic is one of the most effectiveand simplestSEO techniques. As such,
it's worth having a look at content that draws traffic.
An important component of SEO is getting a handle on web site
metrics and measuring traffic. This is not as easy as it sounds, because a great
many competing terms are used, and data is not always reliable.
From an SEO perspective, you need to establish a plan for
measuring traffic so that you can find out objectively which SEO measures have
succeeded.
How much traffic do you aspire to? Another important question,
because SEO approaches will differ depending on whether you want to generate
tons of general broad traffic, or if you are targeting a narrow but
significant niche.
On the Alexa site, you can click the Traffic rankings tab to
see an ordered list of the top 500 Sites updated daily. The Movers and Shakers
list is also interesting. It is a snapshot of the "right here and now" on the
Web, and is useful for aligning your SEO efforts with Web-wide trends in real
time.
It is worth spending time learning about popularity on the Web
if you want to build successful sites. Alexa provides the tools you can use to
see for yourself what is trafficked, and what is gaining or losing among
top-ranked sites.
You can also use Alexa to see traffic statistics for sites that
are not in the top 500. For almost any site that has been around a while, Alexa
will give you an idea of traffic statistics, and whether it is gaining or losing
traffic.
PageRank
Alexa lets you enter descriptive information about your web
site, which others can see if they check your site traffic using Alexa. You can
also make sure that Alexa provides a snapshot of your home page along with its
statistics. Since this service is free, it is certainly worth entering a site
description and monitoring your Alexagarnered statistics.
Alexa works by collating results from users throughout the Web
who have installed the special Alexa Toolbar.If you'd like, you can install
the Alexa Toolbar and help with popularity statistics. There's some question
about the statistical validity of Alexa for less-trafficked sites because of
this method of gathering dataAlexa's results are probably skewed towards users
who are already web savvy and heavy users.
Google uses the PageRank algorithm to order the results
returned by specific search queries. As such, understanding PageRank is crucial
to core SEO efforts to improve natural search results.
Depending on who you ask, PageRank is named after its inventor,
Lawrence Page, Google's co-founderor because it is a mechanism for ranking
pages.
When a user enters a query, also called a search, into Google,
the results are returned in the order of their PageRank.
Originally fairly simple in concept, PageRank now reportedly
processes more than 100 variables. Since the exact nature of this "secret sauce"
is, well, secret, the best thing you can do from an SEO perspective is more or
less stick to the original concept.
The underlying idea behind PageRank is an old one that has been
used by librarians in the pre-Web past to provide an objective method of scoring
the relative importance of scholarly documents. The more citations other
documents make to a particular document, the more "important" the document is,
the higher its rank in the system, and the more likely it is to be retrieved
first.
