Directory Kit
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Independent Thoughts - Initially testking had begun introducing preparatory material by starting with 350-001 and VCP-310. With the success of the programs amongst 640-802 students, now the demand for study guides of 70-290 as well as 70-270 has increased.

In our modern world, webmasters use various tools and portals to measure site popularity. Generally speaking, site popularity can be measured in two ways:

• Link Popularity - How many resources are linking to one single site.
• Traffic - How many people visit your site.

The tool that measures link popularity is Google’s PageRank. And as most of you know, PR is Google?��Ǩ�Ѣs method for measuring site importance on a scale from 0 - 10 (10 is the highest). On the other hand, the tool that measures traffic is Alexa Rank. Just to make sure you understand what Alexa Rank is, I will provide you with its definition.

Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service.

Although, a lot of webmasters do not trust Alexa Rank, there is nothing currently that’s better than Alexa and that’s why many have no choice rather than to use it. Furthermore, Alexa Rank and Pagerank are used to determine the right price for selling any sorts of advertising on your directory. It’s worth noticing that the lower your Alexa Rank is the more popular your site is. For example, very popular sites, such as Google or Yahoo have really low Alexa Ranks (2 and 1). Just like there are ways to increase your PageRank there are also various ways to increase your Alexa Rank. Finally, ten ways to increase your Alexa Rank are:

• Download and use the Alexa Toolbar. Remember that Alexa assigns rank to specific site according to their Toolbar. In other words, your site will have lower rankings (higher traffic) if your visitors use Alexa Toolbar. So why not to use Alexa Toolbar and increase your rankings for free?
• Tell your visitors to use Alexa Toolbar. Since users with Alexa Toolbar are more valuable to your (they help to increase your rankings) why not to increase the percentage of those users and get lower rankings in Alexa? You can do that by personally recommending users to use Alexa by emailing them, writing posts about Alexa and inform why people should use it or placing Alexa promotional banners.
• Use Alexa Rank Widget on your directory. The Alexa Widgets help Alexa track your visitors and thus it helps to assign your lower Alexa Rank. Moreover, a single click on the widget is considered as a single unique visitor. If you want to insert Alexa Widgets on your site, then you can find them here.
• Ride the Alexa Redirect Train. Alexa Redirect Train is a way of increasing your Alexa Rank by giving a link to your site as Alexa Redirect. For example, Alexa Redirect Url for Directory Kit is “http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.directorykit.com”. A single click is considered as unique visitor. If you want to join Alexa Redirect Train, then please click here.
• Get reviews on Alexa. Ask visitors/friends/family members to review your site on Alexa. By getting reviews on Alexa you are showing to Alexa that your site exists and is active and thus Alexa will index it more frequently and assign lower Alexa Rank.
• Optimize your site for the webmaster related theme. With general directories you don’t have to worry about it since most your visitors are webmasters, who have the Alexa Toolbar. However, if you are thinking of starting a niche directory and want to have low Alexa Rank, make sure it is webmaster related directory. Something like a SEO directory but not a biology related directory.
• Collect webmasters emails. Nope, you are wrong, I don’t want you to spam other webmasters nor sell their emails. However, I want you to add them as one of your contacts to one of the popular messengers that best suits you. Such as Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, or MSN Messenger. Once you have a good base of webmaster friends you can use it to improve your Alexa Rank by asking them to review your directory.
• Post in popular webmaster forums. Popular webmaster forums are great free promotion tools when you have reached decent amount of posts and good reputation. Use your avatar and signature links to promote your directory or sites.
• Announce your directory on forums/ask to review it. By announcing your directory on forums and asking to review it, you get a number of benefits. First of all, you get submissions. Secondly, you improve your Alexa Rank since the audience is webmasters. Thirdly, you don’t spend money.
• Try Using UpMyRank.com. I am not sure if this works though because I have never used it before. But I got a couple of good feedback from a number of webmasters. The quote below explains basic idea behind the site:
  

  Simply join and start viewing other members websites with our AutoSurf software. You will earn a credit for every 3 ads you see. Best of all you can leave the AutoSurf program on all night and all day and earn credits while you sleep!

In conclusion, I would like to summarize that webmasters are the key people who help to improve your Alexa Rank. Use the ways, described above, to target your directory for webmasters and thus boost your Alexa Rank. Please share your thoughts and own ways to boost Alexa Rank by leaving comments.

There are thousands directories on the planet. Everyday more and more directories are created. And you know, the more directories there are, the harder it’s to be a successful directory owner. Once each directory is created, your directory is losing a chance of becoming profitable. So what’s the solution to all this? One of the solutions is to analyze your directory’s competition and do something about it.

Follow these three simple steps to analyze your directory’s competition:

• Carefully select and choose your top ten competitors.
• Subscribe to their feeds, bookmark them, and try to check them out approximately twice per week.
• And now, do the analysis by simply asking your self a number of questions and don’t forget to write them down, such as:

Design:

• What’s your first impression about the directory?
• What color scheme the directory uses?
• What font styles and colors are dominant?
• Does it have unique logo, what kind of logo is it?
• Does it have a favicon?

Directory Structure:

• How many categories does the directory offer?
• Do categories cover all concepts of the directory?
• Are categories related to the type of directory? (Most directories call them selfs “Business Directories” while they have default category structure, also known as category dump. )
• Are listings listed in the right category?
• Are listings described well enough?
• Do listings titles follow the guidelines for accepting submission titles.
• Do detailed pages have useful information in them? (Such as, Alexa Rank, Link popularity and so on.)

Promotion:

• How is the directory promoted?
• Does it target the right audience?
• Does it use good attention grabbers?
• Does it promote it self well enough, both in quality and quantity?

Uniqueness

• Does the directory have a blog with unique articles?
• Does the directory offer free phpld/wordpress themes?
• Does the directory offer unique way of selling/displaying links?
• Does the directory have unique template/mods/other features?

(As you might have noticed, all directories look a like just like these questions about uniqueness… So be unique - standout!)

So what? Why do I need to ask these questions?

The purpose of the analysis is not to do what other directory owners practice (as most of you might have thought) but to find out gaps in a directory and try to fill it in your directory. The more successful you can find out the gaps and try to fill them, the more successful your directory is going to be.

Good luck with your analysis, if you find anything interesting about your competitors, please let all directory owners know by posting your thoughts into the comments.