Alexa & Compete Rank, Google PageRank, what does it all mean?
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If you’ve had a bit of a look around the website, you’ve probably noticed that I often refer to “Alexa Rank” or “Google PageRank”. So what are they? What do they do? Do they actually mean anything? Is there anything I can do to improve my ranks?
Well the answer is, kind of.
Alexa Rank – Check yours
To answer the question “Do they actually mean anything?” With Alexa Rank, really, no. It is nothing more than an indicator.
It works out your rank from the number of visitors to your site and how many pages they viewed. Sound pretty straight froward? But how does it know what websites everyone’s visited? Have they teamed up with the FBI and put tracking on everyone’s computer? Probably not! Alexa gets its statistics from users who have installed their toolbar.
The main problem with this is that the toolbar doesn’t do much apart from tell you the rank of the website you’re on, and send what sites you visit back to Alexa. So who’s going to install it? I’d say, mostly only webmasters.
Google PageRank – Pagerank checker (This is not from Google, so I’m not sure on it’s accuracy)
Unlike Alexa rank, Google PageRank is actually very important when it comes to search engine optimisation. As you may or may not know, Google actually have a search engine. You can find it at Google.com. So when you do a search on Google, how does it work out what order to put the results in? It uses a thing called PageRank.
PageRank is a number out of 10 that represents the importance of a webpage (yes, each page of your website gets a separate score). 10 is the best (most important) and 0 is the least important. Google takes into consideration, many many things when calculating a webpage’s PageRank. The two most important things being, your backlinks (from high-ranking, quality websites) and the quality the webpage itself.
Whenever you think about SEO, you’re really thinking about making your website ‘better-quality’. Simple things like ALT tags, META tags, relevant keywords, descriptive titles, gives Google the information it needs about your site.
Compete Rank – Check yours
This is much like Alexa rank, it gets its statistics from a toolabr you have to install, but it also claims to use other sources.
Check out the details here: Compete Help
How to improve your rank
Install their toolbars and set your website(s) as your browser’s homepage. There are supposed to be ways to manipulate your Alexa rank, but why bother? Like I said, it is an indication. Getting yourself a higher rank isn’t going to get you more traffic.
Google pagerank is mostly affected by making your website better quality and getting as many backlinks as you can.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s get some backlinks!
About the Author: Andrew McGrath
Original Link: Alexa & Compete Rank, Google PageRank, what does it all mean?
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