Alexa Ranking and Google PR Update

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It’s that time of the month again when I evaluate how my blogs performed over the past 30 or so days.

There were some revelations and realizations this month in my forays towards optimization and monetization. These two are so closely related that it would seem absurd to think of one minus the other. To monetize you need to optimize and you optimize because you want to monetize. Anyway, Alexa first.

My two main blogs, thirdworldgeek.com and agiledeals.com were sort of contrasts in terms of optimization strategy and purpose. The former is sort of a hybrid; lots of posts about certain topics with some posts clearly written for search engines. I make no bones about that. I wanted to rank high in Alexa and traffic, from whichever source, is the fuel that fires Alexa’s ranking. The latter however, is purely a blog about travels and destinations. No deviance there. It’s purpose is clear and there are no extraneous posts that clutter up the site.

When the month of May started, thirdworldgeek.com was looking at 199K in terms of ranking while Agiledeals.com was only hovering at around 300K, though rapidly gaining momentum. By month end however, I was shocked to see Agiledeals.com completely overtaking thirdworldgeek.com! Both blogs are now at 184K with Agiledeals.com taking a slight advantage in ranking.

This puzzled me no end. thirdworldgeek.com’s traffic is at least 5 times what agiledeals.com is getting and yet the ranking result says otherwise.

Somehow, I attribute this to two things:

1. Agiledeals.com’s readers have installed the Alexa toolbar thereby making every visit count, while thirdworldgeek.com’s visitors generally come from search engines thus the lesser impact.

2. Not so sure about this but Entrecard may have something to do with this. One of my elves is focusing heavily in entrecard for his traffic hits and I am inclined to believe that most entrecard users have the Alexa toolbar installed. This is just speculation but I’m inclined to think that this is so anyway. I’ll have my other elf do this tactic and see what happens with thirdworldgeek.com
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Google PR Update

After waiting for so long, Google finally decided to give me some love. Thirdworldgeek is now PR3 while Agiledeals.com just hit PR2. This is good news since I’ve been getting frustrated by the lack of movement. Let’s see if this will contribute to my SERP results.

SEO Campaign

I did an honest to goodness SEO campaign for the May 2009 CPA Board Exams and got really good results. When the Board Exam result was released, I got around 10K pageviews, which is good considering that only around 5K+ took the exams. I also got a ton of adsense clicks but this wasn’t a high paying keyword so nothing that would make your eye pop.

Adsense Realizations

There is indeed such a thing as Google Right Pricing. This is a concept wherein the amount of money that you receive when somebody clicks on your adsense ads is substantially lower than what you ought to receive. This happens when you have so many ads out there where only casual browsers see and not much conversion happens. The effect is that instead of receiving $0.20 per click for example, you only get $0.11. Sucks huh. The trick here is to check all the sites that you’ve created, delete those that are not performing that well in terms of visits and such. Abandoned sites contribute heavily to Google Right Pricing.

Also, if you can, do not show your ads in your homepage. More often than not, you’re the one browsing your homepage. Most visitors especially those who came from search engines (who are more valuable by the way) are directly directed to your specific page referred to by the search engine. This is where your adsense should appear. Unless of course you’re some bigshot with gazillions of loyal followers goes directly to your site. But if you’re not, it doesn’t make sense to have ads in your homepage.

One thing I’ve noted as well is that the bigger the ad size, the higher the CPM. CPM is the amount Google pays you for every thousand impressions. I find the 336 adsense block pays the most. And the best place to put these? Just below the title of your post. Amazing click through rates(CTR) there. I’ve been averaging 1.5 – 3.0% in CTR since I’ve been strictly enforcing it.

There are other realizations as well but I think I’ll put them in another post. This one is getting lengthy.

‘Til next month!
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You may want to read the following related posts as well:

1. April 2009 Alexa Ranking Update
2. Alexa Page Rank Update September 2009
3. June 2009 Ranking Updates
4. Delayed August 2009 Alexa Ranking And Blogging Update
5. How To Increase Your Alexa Ranking Quickly
6. Alexa Ranking Update February 2009
7. Alexa Ranking Update

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