Alexa ranking is a very strange thing.

I wrote about efforts to improve the ranking of this site a few weeks ago.  So far I have been marginally successful in that the ranking has risen from 1,627,533 to 1,275,521.  It’s not much, but it’s in the right direction.

What is surprising about the above figures is that traffic has not increased at all in the period between then and now.  In fact, it shows a downward trend.

In contrast, traffic to the other site has remained remarkably constant over the same period, yet its ranking has dropped from 195,510 to 203,289.

I am aware that Alexa is not the best yardstick for the measurement of site traffic, as it depends on the viewer having the plugin installed, but I find the above figures somewhat bemusing.

The one unfortunate thing about Alexa though is that it tends to be used by advertising companies to determine a site’s popularity.  As advertising is contained in both sites, Alexa ranking is fairly important to me.

The only thing I can think of is that this site tend to have more technical content, and therefore is more likely to be visited by people with the plugin.

Two of the most ofetn asked questions in the blogging world are “how to I start a blog” and “how do I get people to read it”.

The latter is one question I would like to experiment with.

This site has been ticking over since the beginning of last December.  As an eperiment, I would like to see if I can improve its performance from the point of view of visitors and ranking.

Determining a site’s popularity is not easy.  Some people go by the number of visitors within a time period [say, a week or a month] while others go by page views.  Another method is by ranking.

There are three generally accepted ranking figures – Technorati, Google and Alexa.

Measuring visitors to a site is not easy.  On the Head Rambles site, I currently use Ice Rocket, Google Analytics, Woopra and raw log files.  These all give wildly different figures for the same period, so effectively, I ignore them and use them for trending purposes only.

Ranking is a different matter.

I have just registered this site with Technorati, and it apparently has a ranking of 13.  This is roughly what I would expect for a relatively new and unexciting site.  Head Rambles used to have a ranking in excess of 200, but this has dropped off dramatically as the figures are recycled and existing links are discounted and only new links are measured.  Head Rambles currently stands at 93.

Google Ranking is deemed to be important if you are interested in search engine ranking.  Personally, I have not found this to be the case, as Head Rambles consistently shoots to the top of Google within minutes of a post being published.  Head Rambles used to have a ranking of 5 with Google, which was excellent.  However that dropped to 3, presumably when they discovered I was advertising with a non-Google affiliate?  Ranking for this site is currently 4, which I think is pretty good.

Alexa ranking is a strange one.  It is widely used as a benchmark for advertising sales, yet is notoriously difficult to predict as it seems to result from counting the number of visits from people who have the Alexa plug-in installed on their browser.   If this is the case [and Alexa is not that popular as a plug-in] then it is an extremely bad method of quantifying a site’s value.  However, this is the metric chosen by the industry, and who am I to argue?

The Alexa ranking for this site is currently 1,627,533 and it will be interesting to see if I can improve on this figure.

Over the next while, I am going to try various techniques to improve the traffic to this site.  I will of course write about my efforts, and post the corresponding rise or fall in traffic.

It would indeed be nice if I could get this site’s Alexa ranking up close to that of Head Rambles which is currently at 195,510.

We shall see?

I have been watching the ‘Cowangate’ business with some interest.

I’m not talking here about peoples reactions, so much as the effect it is having on Head Rambles.

The first post on the subject went up on Monday, and the resulting traffic stream is remarkable.  So remarkable, that I had to investigate further.

I did a search for ‘Brian Cowan portraits’ and various logical combinations of other searches and came up in the #1 slot worldwide in Google.  I see Donncha has since jumped to the top of the queue in most, but the two sites vie for the top two spots.

What is also interesting is that Head Rambles’ Google Ranking has dropped to zero!  Does Google not trust its own top ranking search results?

I’m not particularly worried about rankings as the important traffic to Head Rambles tends to come through links and RSS feeds, but it is interesting to note how easy it is to hit top spot without even trying?