For those of you who know nothing at all about PageRanks and Alexa rankings, let me explain that they’re the modern equivenant of a Nielsen ratings for websites. 

Alexa measures your website performance by volunteer users, in effect millions of average people agree to allow Alexa to collect statistics about their surfing habits and from that data, Alexa tracks and monitors activity on the Internet. At Halloween this year, Alexa ranked my website at 2,291,883. Today it’s at 231,354 which is a 1790% improvement for spending about 20 minutes a day on my website.

Google on the other hand ranks your website by looking at who your website connects to and in return, who connects to your website. That’s a pretty over simplified way to look at it but it’s also the general gist of the method. It’s a bit like a popularity contest, Google believes that if websites with high page ranks (the system is from 0 to 10) link to you consistently, your content must be of a certain value.

So now that you understand what a PageRank and Alexa ranking mean, here’s how I earned my respectable rankings in both … (drum roll anybody?) … quality content, consistently posted.

I know that you’re all hoping for a much better answer than that but sadly it’s the truth. My very good friend Chris Bavota jumped from a PR0 to a PR4 in just three months, doing exactly the same thing … he posts great articles that people love to read and he makes sure that he does it regularly.

Chris and I followed some easy to understand advice:

• we registered a good domain name that people could remember
• hosted with a reliable hosting company so people could find us
• installed a great software package to help us manage his content
• ensured the code was clean so Google could read it
• built quality content that people wanted to read 

Once that was done, both Chris and I did what any self respecting blog owner would do:

• we used deep linking techniques to ensure our readers know about related content on our website
• we posted links to other peoples blogs, helping our readers find similar content
• we let other blog owners know that we had articles of interest for their readers

There are no scams, no black hat SEO techniques, no short cuts and no tricks. Quality rankings on a quality search engine takes nothing more than a little bit of effort, quality content and the determination to contribute something positive to the Internet as a whole.