An Alexa ranking is every kid’s nightmare: a number that measures popularity. You heard me right, an Alexa ranking is a number that tells you exactly how many websites are more popular than your website. And you thought you left lunchroom dramas back in high school.

Obviously as the big wigs in the social web, Google, Facebook and Youtube take the cake as the ‘Populars’, while everyone else sits waiting and anxious for a chance to hang with the cool kids. The number is expressed in relatively big numbers and obviously, the more popular you are, the smaller Alexa you get. These number are updated often, usually daily, so with an exception of the big three, the numbers shuffle fast. You could be in with the in crowd one second, and out like moon shoes the next.

Metaphors aside, let’s get into the meat of what exactly you learn from seeking out your Alexa score. Our rank at Jacob Tyler is 283,640. That means that there are 283,639 websites out there in the world that are more popular than we are. In the US, there are only 115,318 bigger fish in the sea while in San Diego we’re moving up with a rank of 6,752. We’ve got 132 sites linking in and then we have a breakdown of demographics. According to Alexa, our audience is predominantly male, college educated, between the ages of 25 and 44 with other age groups represented and most are visiting the site from work. Most of our site traffic is from the United States and revolves around search terms pertaining to our industry: san diego web design, san diego ad agency etc. You can see pertaining search queries and in some cases, trafficking information….if you’re popular enough.

You can also compare different sites to one another and I’m proud to announce that Jacob Tyler Creative Group has the highest among the similar company sites I compared.  Other companies shall remain nameless to avoid tears.

You can also see where the traffic is coming from by clicking the Clickstream tab. For us, the top two referring sites are Google and Facebook and let it be known that Social Media Marketing has a HUGE impact on this score – so don’t miss the boat on the Social Media Revolution.

That, in a nut shell, is what the Alexa ranking can offer you so I encourage everyone to take a look at yours  and work on making that journey toward the top.

By Nicole Fletcher

It truly baffles me how even today, at the end of 2010, people are still completely blind to the wonderful world of social media and the endless list of possibilities this exciting new industry brings. I get that people ‘don’t have time to tweet‘, ‘don’t care what their sister’s friend ate for breakfast’ or simply ‘think this whole thing is just a fad’ – but everyone is on Facebook and everyone is inundated by the web daily. Why then are people so against learning about and taking advantage of all this new age of tech wonder has to offer?

I’m not one for conformity, after all, my personal blog is called Deviate From the Norm…but it seems clear to me that, unlike palazzo pants and bedazzled denim, Social Media is here to stay and some people just can’t, or won’t, accept that. People talk about the social verse like it’s some uncool food item in the nerdy kids’ lunchbox; like it’s something tacky or lame that the popular kids will soon force into extinction. I’m here to tell you, as Jacob Tyler’s new Social Media Director, it’s not. It’s here to stay and if you aren’t on it, well frankly, we’ll take off full speed into the future without you.

This new age of marketing that we are all so fortunate to be witnessing first hand, is just starting to bloom and grow. Social Media has totally redefined marketing, as your clients and customers can now take an active stance toward…or against your brand. With the billboards and television commercials of yesteryear, businesses never heard a peep from their clientele, who essentially hold the fate of their brand in their hands. Now, corporations, small businesses and public figures alike get to hear, see and feel it all. The truth might hurt…but better to hear it loud and clear in bold black and white, than not at all.

If you’re a business small or large you MUST know that you are not above this. You MUST take advantage of the marketing tools available to you for if you don’t, your competition surely will and probably already has. Most people don’t understand Twitter and I get that. I guarantee though, if you spend some time educating yourself, you’ll learn that thousands if not millions of people are already talking about exactly what you do for a living, or think about, or eat, or believe and those people should be on your radar as prospective clients and friends. The simple lesson is this: you must develop a presence for yourself..or hire someone to handle your social media for you. Most of the most modern marketing tools are available to you at no cost but your time, effort and passion. One of the most basic marketing fundamentals centers around ‘being your brand’ so if you’re not willing to give it some love, how can you possibly expect to succeed? If I haven’t convinced you on the vitality of this rapidly growing industry, here are some stats to gnaw on.

-500 million people are on Facebook
-Human beings spend 700 billion minutes on Facebook per month
-30+ billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month
-24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing declines in circulations- shock gasp
-There are over 200 million blogs
-More than 600 million searches take place on Twitter each month
-Lady Gaga has 7.2+ million followers on Twitter to date.

Get the point? Social Media is here to stay, so learn about it before we’re so far down the futuristic highway that there’s no hope of catching up.

Well…as Jacob Tyler continues to grow and OUT grow our current office space, we have finally (after much search and negotiation) found the perfect office space in downtown San Diego. JTCG will take over the 10th floor of the Torbati building on Broadway and 6th. The space is VERY cool and we look forward to posting photos when we are all set up. Here’s a couple construction pics as the tenant improvements are underway. Look forward to a move-in announcement coming soon and we plan to be in the new office by mid November.

By Les Kollegian
Jacob Tyler Creative Group

Jacob Tyler and our sister company SEO Town handle Search Engine Optimization for a broad base of clients. The thing about SEO is that it’s not only a process that is 100% iterative, it’s also always a 100% learning experience. Keeping up with the brilliant minds at Google is not always an easy task even though they offer to help through support documents, forums, and more. For those of you out there who are saying “what about Bing and Yahoo?”… they have their place but they don’t hold a search “candle” to that of Google. This isn’t just because of their market share, but mostly because of the quality of their search algorithms. Thus, as a creative marketing agency, we put most of our emphasis on creating leads for our clients from Google and now even YouTube, the world’s second most searched search engine.

So now we get to a question we have been asking recently. Why are search results sometimes different on different systems and how can we accurately track where we rank organically in the eyes of our customers? Great question! Not so easy answer.

The good and bad:
Google does an amazing job of making searches for users relevant to their preferences by automatically personalizing the results. While this can be GREAT for the typical Web browser, it makes finding “true” search results a little more difficult. Here’s why.

In the past, the only way to receive better or “preferred/personal” results was to sign up for personalized search. Now, you can get customized results whenever you use Google. Depending upon whether or not you’re signed in to a Google Account when you search, the information they use for customizing your experience will be different:

Signed-in personalization: When you’re signed in, Google personalizes your search experience based on your Web History. If you don’t want to receive personalized results while you’re signed in, you can turn off Web History and remove it from your Google Account. You can also view and remove individual items from your Web History. At Jacob Tyler, we recommend our clients disable personalization on their own systems to get the most accurate search results. Otherwise, Google may place YOUR link toward the top of your results pages based on your previous search and clicks. See the image below on how to delete your Web history/personalization.

Signed-out customization: When you’re not signed in, Google customizes your search experience based on past search information linked to your browser, using a cookie. Google stores up to 180 days of signed-out search activity linked to your browser’s cookie, including queries and results you click.

Because many people might search from a single computer, the browser cookie may be associated with more than one person’s search activity. For this reason, Google doesn’t provide a method for viewing this signed-out search activity. If you don’t want to receive customized results while you are signed out, you can turn off these search customizations. See the image below to turn off cookies for signed out searches.

Of course, deleting cookies effects a LOT on your system including personal site preferences related to browsing, passwords, purchases, and more so you may or may not want to do this depending on “easy” you want your browsing experiences to be. For more information on how to control cookies, please visit http://www.aboutcookies.org

Here’s an illustration of the information Google uses in each case:

At this point, most of the internet browsing population is using Internet Explorer or Firefox for their day-to-day surfing and information. While it may make sense to turn off cookies and web history for those interested in the most “neutral” and true results, it’s also a pain and erases information that each user wants stored for future use. I recommend downloading another browser to use for your specific searches to determine organic ranking. For example, download Google Chrome and set up the browser to run in “incognito mode“. Once this is set up, customization and personalization features are turned off and you can just stick to this browser for your rank checking curiosity.

If you’d rather stick to your current Firefox and IE browsers, there is also a plug-in you can download from Yoast that makes it simple to disable personalization.

For any business, it is extremely important to stay on top of your current search engine rankings. To do so, you must avoid personalized search as you may end up seeing different rankings on different computers. While this is a great search feature, it will not provide useful insight for your SEO marketing campaigns.