Over the next few months (at least three), I’m going to be testing the value of metrics. I’ll be looking for sites that are supposed to help increase traffic to my website, one way or another. The first three tests begin today. If you want to help me along, click on the image to the left and write a review about this website. If you place something like that on your own website, let me know and I’ll be happy to reciprocate.
Alexa
Experienced online marketers know the Alexa traffic ranking doesn’t really mean anything. Your visitors either have to be using the Alexa toolbar with their web browsers or you have to have one of the Alexa widgets on every page of your website. The latter method is more effective than the former because most visitors haven’t even heard of Alexa.
The Alexa traffic rank doesn’t have any real bearing on your traffic, except when it’s being examined by other marketers and potential advertisers. It won’t raise your rankings in the search engines and it won’t get you more social visitors from places like Facebook. If you’re trying to market yourself to advertisers, however, it’s extremely important to get the ranking as close to 0 as possible – a lower number is better.
TopOfBlogs
If you register your blog at TopOfBlogs and paste some code on every page of your website, your ranking at their website will improve but that’s about all. You will, of course, get a few visits from curiosity seekers.
The people that run TopofBlogs aren’t dummies, by the way. They know you’ll get more traffic from a premium listing where your blog is shown at the top of every page and they offer a premium listing starting at $8.00 USD per week.
My Three Tests
The first one is to see if anyone will take the time to write an Alexa review (by clicking on the image above). The second one is to see if the Alexa ranking will drop back down to where it was last year (or better) – from the current rank of 158,552. I’m not sure what happened, but many websites that used to rank where I did (below 50K) are all at 100K and above now. Well, I guess I’ll find out if the widget at the bottom makes a difference over the course of three months or so.
The third test is to see if my rank at TopOfBlogs will rise to the top in the “Writing” category and eventually on the front page.
Again, I’m more than willing to reciprocate on any Alexa reviews and anything else you can think of. I’m keeping an eye out, figuratively of course, to see if any other ranking widgets or services may have any effect on website metrics.
Feel free to point out anything you know about in the comments below.
Gave a glowing review. Hope that helps :-)
And I have already done the same for you.