Alexa, Google, Compete, and others

Recently, I had a discussion with one of our media partners concerning the accuracy of Google, Alexa, Compete, and other Internet marketing resources and measurement tools.

There are a lot of blogs out there that bash Google, even lawsuits against them for "unfair" searching methods, claiming that the Google search algorithm gives them an unfair disadvantage over competitors for some reason or another.

Others complain about Alexa being the industry standard for measuring ranking, that its measurements can be "played."

I have news for everyone. None of these tools are perfect, and they all can be either used to your advantage or else you will fall behind. I see this everyday with Google organic listing. If you do not take time to optimize your website for Google ranking, you will soon fall behind in the organic listing, with your competitors listed above you! It does not benefit you to complain about Google. They are the leaders and more of us use the Google search engine than any other. Until that changes and we find a better tool that we all like and use more than Google, we should "game" Google in order to stay competitive and to get the best search results possible.

An example of this can be demonstrated with our keywords "MiMiC Simulation" and "MYNAH." As of today, if you type in either of these keywords in the Google search engine, you will find http://www.mynah.com ranked #1 organically. This is ideal and what we want. That did not come easily though. For years and years, a search for MYNAH would bring up many articles on the bird, a common parrot that can mimic human speech. Discussions of this bird were in much higher prevalence than discussion of our company. That is no longer true.

Additionally, the common term "MiMiC" is used by hundreds of companies for many, many different products, including several various software products--none of which are direct competitors, but nonetheless, potential hogs of "our" space. Pushing our product to the top of the list was not something we could pay for or push forward just by sheer will power. It took years of developing good content and growing as an organization, combined with SEO efforts and Internet marketing.

These same principles are true with Alexa and their ranking system. The system is not perfect. Once you know how to optimize your site for best results, you can help to improve your ranking. This is not a bad thing.  No matter what tool we use, this is going to be the case, to some degree.

We have improved from a ranking of 2 million to a ranking of about 326,000 in the last year. We are ranking 5 out of 10 by Google Page Rank. Our major key words MiMiC Simulation and MYNAH come up as #1 in the organic listing.

My argument has always been to first improve your site and obtain users with good content. This is why I spend most of my day writing new content and developing white papers and articles that are relevant to users in our industry. If your site has good information, people will return, and you will draw in new visitors over time. After improving your site with good content, then and only then make efforts to optimizing searches and to maximize the effectiveness of measurement tools like Google and Alexa.

Resources:
http://cohn.wordpress.com/category/alexa-rank/
http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
http://bloggista.com/2008/04/18/alexa-boom-and-bang/

Jason Covington
MYNAH
MiMiC Simulation



Edited by Jason Covington - 13 Nov 2008 at 12:55pm

Alexa rankings can't be the sole determinants of measuring a sites importance and popularity as the http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main/fortunehotels.in rankings do not take into account all the browser types like Windows Vista etc.