RightSite Marches On

One of our primary missions this year at RightSite.asia, my online b2b for industrial property, has been to build up our web traffic, and our primary means for doing this has been through search engine optimisation (SEO).  Lately the RightSite team has scored a number of victories in this mission, and well, the occasional setback. (But I’m only admitting this because we are compelled to tell the truth here on the Internet).

How RightSite Uses SEO

SEO is important to us because RightSite basically makes it money by charging members for premium services, and these services provide RightSite’s users with tools for marketing themselves on the Internet via RightSite. If RightSite is a highly ranked site on the Internet and gets a lot of relevant traffic, then these services will help our members to market themselves effectively.  If RightSite does not get a lot of traffic, then our services are really not all that valuable.

Tools for Measuring SEO Performance

We use a lot of tools for measuring how successful our web traffic is, primarily Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.  One other tool that we use is Alexa.com, and this is what has been driving me crazy. According to its website, Alexa is

Alexa’s Web site is built on the notion that timely and relevant information is essential to a vital web experience.

Alexa Site Information – Alexa has built an unparalleled database of information about sites that includes statistics, related links and more. All of this information can be found on Alexa’s Site Overview pages, Traffic Detail pages and Related Links pages. To access these pages, simply type the URL of any site into the Alexa Search box.

The big number that people seem to look at on Alexa is the Traffic Rank, which shows how your website traffic ranks compared to all the other websites in the world.  Google is #1, Yahoo is #2, and — well, I think you have it figured out by now.

However, the issue that I have with Alexa is the wild variations in its rankings.  In general, I have been pleased to see that RightSite has made significant progress since it was launched in March of 2009.  At first we had no Alexa ranking, and then we started showing up at around #2,000,000 in the world, gradually worked our way up to a six-figure ranking, and now we have broken into the top 100,000 this month.  However, while we have made progress, there have been wild variations from week to week.

If you look at the images in the photo gallery above, you will see that RightSite was ranked at #15,962 in one frame (as of Saturday the 14th of November). However, on Sunday the 15th, our ranking had slid back to #99,119.  Both of these numbers represent significant progress over our 3 month and 1 month average rankings, but if the folks from Alexa are listening out there a little stability would be appreciated.