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I ran across an item last week that may be of interest, and I'll share what I've learned so far.
First, ExactSeek has formed a partnership with Alexa. The essence of this is that they have begun to use the popularity rating from Alexa.com as a major factor in ranking their search results.
What I find most interesting about this is that it makes ExactSeek the first and only search engine to include something other than content, and incoming and outgoing links to determine a site's ranking within the search results for a given keyword phrase. The best one-word description for those more common forms of ranking, is "relevance".
Popularity Ranking
All web site listings in the ExactSeek
database will
also be ranked on the basis of content relevance - but by including the Alexa
ratings in their ranking algorithm, ExactSeek is incorporating
"popularity" into their search results ranking.
It has been a constant struggle for search engines to stay one step ahead of the search engine optimizers - to insure that their search results reflect this "relevance" to what the searcher is seeking. User popularity will be more difficult to manipulate than other factors, because it is certainly more difficult to manipulate the surfing public than it is to manipulate the search engines.
What, exactly does this mean to you and me?
Most importantly, it means that all of our traffic, whether earned through other search engines, advertising in newsletters, resource boxes included with our published articles, or through PPC advertising campaigns, etc. - will affect our site ranking within ExactSeek's search results.
Of course, ExactSeek is not the only search engine. Nor is it currently the most popular. But they have made some recent strides. ExactSeek recently acquired 3 more web search engines and brought them into the ExactSeek fold, and there are now 6 search engines showing search results from ExactSeek. Also, search engine popularity is (in large part) driven by how well it serves its customer - the seeker - and if this change results in more accurate rankings (in the eyes of the customer), ExactSeek and others who might adopt this strategy may compete more favorably and become more important to anyone trying to popularize their website.
Rather than spending countless hours or dollars trying make sure our web sites will be ranked favorably by the search engines, we would be able to spend that time on more direct means of attracting traffic, with higher search engine rankings being a by-product of those efforts.
Ranking Tools
Remember, though, that relevance is still a factor.
What follows here is not new, but since I've focused your attention on ExactSeek for a few minutes, I felt it was important enough that I should review it for you.
ExactSeek regularly crawls all sites on its database on a monthly basis, but they have some interesting tools to help you accelerate your relevance ranking, and these are all available right from a Site Ranking FAQ page. This FAQ page gives a basic description of the Title Tag, Meta Keywords Tag, and the Meta Description Tag - and then explains Site Ranking without getting too technical.
In the Site Ranking Explained section, there is a link to the tools to Improve Your Ranking.
Let's look at these in a logical order.
Check Your Site Ranking
This is simple enough. You simply enter the URL of your website, and the search terms you want to check it against. Search results for each page on your site that is listed in ExactSeek, are displayed with a number next to them - indicating where they would be ranked in the results of a normal search for those terms.
Now it would be nice if there was a magic button to Improve Your Site Ranking - but you'll just have to use the Back button, and follow their recommended procedure.
Improve Your Site Ranking
You can read the instructions for yourself, but basically the steps are to
-
review the content of your page, and modify the Title, Meta Keywords, and Meta Description Tags,
-
do the search again, and
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Click on the Crawl button showing next to the page you modified.
Step 3 is the important one. Once you request that your site be re-crawled, ExactSeek will crawl your site within 7 days - re-ranking your site based on its findings from that crawl. In practice, I found that my site was re-crawled within 48 hours of my request, but at a minimum you can make improvements on a weekly basis.
Plus any changes you make in the content relevance for ExactSeek should also benefit you in other search engines.
Featured Listings
ExactSeek has added a new, Google-type ad to their search results page, but they've added their own twist. If you aren't familiar with Google AdWords, I suggest reading "In the Trenches with Google AdWords", an article detailing a campaign I recently did.
If you are familiar with Google AdWords, here are the important differences:
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It is still early to tell how Featured Listings will fare, but here are my reactions to the program.
While you have less control over placement of ads, a Featured Listing ad campaign is much simpler to administer. Other than "tweaking" the ad text or headline, you can just set it and forget it.
While the difference is the amount of ad text appears negligible, it amounts to roughly 50% more ad that can be put to good use.
And... the price is right. A 3 month ad only costs you $4 per month, and if you commit for a year that comes down to $3 per month. There are also price breaks for multiple listings (at 6, 11, & 15). Any of these options is easier to budget than fluctuating Pay Per Click listings.
One last observation. In order to guarantee your ad being seen at least once for every 3 searches on your keyword phrase, the number of advertisers with the same keyword phrase is limited to 24. If you want to try this out, don't be the 25th person to request your keyword phrase!
Conclusions?
I think the inclusion of popularity ratings in the ranking algorithm is a positive step for both website owners and searchers, alike. Only time will tell if the practice is adopted by other search engines, but in the meantime I will be monitoring the ExactSeek rankings of a couple of my sites very closely. In fact, I will be comparing those rankings with those on other search engines.
I have already started using the re-crawl feature to see just how quickly I can make a difference, and
I intend to replicate 2 of my Google AdWord campaigns as Feature Listings in ExactSeek, so I can compare results and test the value of Feature Listings.
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