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.

You might have noticed that a big part of social network marketing is letting customers and colleagues get to know you. It doesn’t matter whether the relationship is with you personally, or just their impression of your company – either way, you want them to feel like they’re getting a sense of what you’re all about.

Developing a consistent tone and voice is an important part of that.

Over time, as people read your blogs, see your profile updates, and receive messages from you, they should begin to know what to expect. The reason this is important is because readers and listeners want to know who you are to them. Just as fans will often desert a band or novelist who suddenly switches genres, your customers and followers might give up on you if your mood changes from week to week.

Here are a few popular social networking “faces” you or your company might put on. Trying one doesn’t stop you from using another – most of us are a combination of these – but set a tone early on and keep things consistent:

The expert. If your strength is a wealth of experience in your industry, or a set of skills that few other people possess, make sure this comes through in the way you communicate on social networking sites. There’s a lot of value in being seen as an expert – including greater exposure and bigger fees for your services – so take advantage of this one if you can.

Informative. While some people might consider an informative persona the same as being an expert, they’re actually slightly different. Companies and self-employed professionals looking to build informative profiles can draw a lot of traffic from simple explanations of complex issues – even if they aren’t the foremost authorities in their fields. The point here is to aim for clarity, not necessarily giving answers that can’t be disputed.

Controversial. Creating arguments online is an easy way to generate traffic and feedback, not to mention attention. Of course, it’s easy to take this tactic too far and end up alienating your audience, but if you have the kind of personality that likes to draw controversy, play to your strengths and use that to build a strong social networking platform.

Fun. Taking a traditionally derived subject, like insurance or finance, for example, and making it colorful is a good way to attract industry professionals as well as outside readers. Putting a lot of fun and humor into your social networking communications is definitely a winning tactic… as long as it doesn’t stop potential customers from taking you seriously.

Two things to avoid… Because social networking is typically as much about friendships, or at least friendly business relationships, as it is getting work done, there are two “deadly sins” that every marketer should avoid. The first is to be boring. Really, that rule could extend to any marketing or advertising communication, but online it’s especially damaging. Your readers are never more than a mouse click away from something interesting, so keep that in mind as you compete for their attention.

The second big error is to come off as being overly-commercial. Yes, people are going to realize that your company blog or profile is there to help you sell; but that doesn’t mean you have to do it in the same way you would with a sales letter. Let your audience get to know you, and maybe even enjoy themselves a little bit, and you can embed far more powerful marketing messages than you could by using straight-line sales pitch.

One final note. The larger your company – or your social networking effort – the more likely it is that you’ll have several people, internal and external, involved in putting your plan into action. With that in mind, it’s important that every one of them understand what sort of voice you’re trying to achieve, and can hit it consistently. The last thing you want is a set of profiles and messages that read like they were composed by a dozen different people… even if they were.

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.

I was reading an article today on Search Marketing Standard, by Chris Stiner regarding web design site restructure, who gives some very relevant information on the steps to take to proper optimization when re-designing or structuring a Web site. In fact, we often try to explain this process to our clients but frankly, I think Chris says it best here so I might as well save my breath. Thanks Chris!

The challenges of restructuring a site that has been optimized for SEO are major. If you are going to make fundamental changes to the look, flow, and — most importantly — content of your site, here are three important steps you should follow if you want to maintain your positive rankings in the SERP s.

1. Create a one-to-one 301 redirect map of pages from the old site to the new site. Make sure the pages are as close to an exact match as possible.
2. Make sure that any old site pages that do not have an exact corresponding new site page are redirected at a category level.
3. Any old site pages left that still do not have a home should be redirected to the new site home page.

The reasons for doing this are plenty. Your website is full of assets that you need to protect. Here are the top three things you want to maintain during and after a restructure of your site.

1. External links to your website. People who follow these links need to land on relevant pages. If you lose the relevancy of an inbound link by redirecting it to a generic page, you lose most of its value. More importantly, you want the search engines to map the links correctly.
2. Deep link pages of your site in the SERPs. When users click on them, you will want the correct pages to show up. This mirrors point #1, but from the user’s perspective via the search engine.
3. Bookmarks of your site. When a user attempts to go to a bookmark, you want to make sure they get the information they are looking for. Again, relevancy is king.

If you have a large site (over 100 pages or so) here are three techniques to help you prioritize your pages to ensure you are taking care of the most important content first.

1. Identify which pages are receiving the most traffic. Your analytics software will help you here.
2. Use Google Webmaster Tools to identify your external links and what pages they are landing on.
3. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to locate the top pages listed by your external links. Yahoo lists this in order of importance most of the time.

By taking a serious look at your site structure and not skimping on the upfront work of site mapping and 301 redirects, you can eliminate most of the headaches that can come as a result of a poorly planned SEO restructuring.