Is Alexa a good place to start for search engine promotion

I’ve know of Alexa.com as a good place to research traffic across the internet for about 5 years or so. The thing that makes it useful is that you can immediately locate the top ranked sites on the internet. I was able to see that by going to their Traffic Rankings page I could isolate the top ranked UK web sites and be given a list of 100 of the most visited.

I visited Alexa today and the top three sites listed were

1. Google UK
2. Yahoo
3. Ebay

Now, before continuing I should say the rankings on Alexa.com are based on three months of aggregated historical data from Alexa toolbar users, not from votes or by any independent source. It is important in search engine promotion to know the source of the data used for giving sites rankings.

As I have accounts on Google, Yahoo and Ebay, I felt that this was probably a good thing to know that Stirlyn, is at least visible on all these systems either via direct insertion into their indexes or by my profile being available to list on them

(see: Google search Yahoo search Ebay search)

As you can see Stirlyn or this website appear either at the top of the search results or certainly on the first page.Achieving such high visibility on one word is not such a difficult task in this case as ’stirlyn’ is not a common word. The main aim when promoting yourself or your business online is to be found by people searching using common words or phrases.
If I were to pick, I would choose to promote my photography services. Therefore the purpose of this series of posts on search engine promotion is to chart the success in my efforts to get listed in searches that contain such terms as ‘portrait photography’, ’social photography’, ‘environmental photography’ or similar. As I live in London I am also going to try to highlight the localised nature of my work by trying to get links in relevant local sites. If you browse any of the sites that I use to display photographic work or my photography business for example Flickr or morlenefisher.com you will see that there are a number of images there taken in London or portraits of individuals.

The content of stirlyn.co.uk is varied by nature so in order to get listed using those terms, I must have content on the site that is relevant to those search terms. However another really good thing to know, especially when it comes to being listed on the major search engines, is that they rank your site higher if you have other high ranking sites linked to you! Can you see why I start at Alexa now. I chose this starting point because I know I can find the top 100 sites on the Internet, with a UK focus, that millions of Alexa users use everyday.

Next stop is determining which of the 100 site will be relevant or will have content relevant to photography. Of the list as it stands today, in addition to the three listed above, I have chosen to concentrate on the following:

1. Microsoft Network (MSN)
2. Myspace
3. YouTube
4. Amazon.co.uk
5. Blogger.com
6. Gumtree
7. Yell.com
8. thebestof.co.uk
9. iStockphoto.com
10. match.com
11. datingdirect.com

I am going to develop strategies for either linking or providing relevant content on stirlyn.co.uk for these sites. You can continue to read about the successes (or failures) within these pages. I promise to keep you informed as to what is going on over the next few months. Hopefully something of what I am doing will help you to promote yourself or your business as well.

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