A ranking related question

[study]

Hi there,

I am not sure whether this is the right place to post this question but I think what I am going to ask is (IMHO) an interesting topic to discuss about which can help people to directing traffics to their website(s) in a short period of time(within 8 weeks).

I wonder how is it possible for a totally new website (about 3 months old) can be ranked as high as around 15,000 on Alexa and has a reach of 46% on average within that 3 months? Furthermore, the website doesn't have any keywords for the meta tags, doesn't have any related links directed to the website and doesn't even turned out to be within the first 10 pages of Google and the major S.E.(including the sponsor links section) for that particular market.

I think there must be a logical explanation to explain this feat which appears to be i-m-possible to most people as we were told or taught by most of not all marketing experts that usually you have to have meta tags(with highly relevant keywords), submit a website and wait for 6 months or so to get some traffics, and build your database by your own newsletter etc. if you want your website to be successful(in terms of ranking and traffic) as that particular website. Is it possible to do this seemingly i-m-possible feat without actually breaking the bank?

[CainIV]

the website doesn't have any keywords for the meta tags

Meta tags are only breadcrumbs for the visitor, and have a *negligible* impact on ranking (here comes the boos)

doesn't have any related links directed to the website

As measured in? Remember Google shows a very small samples of links to any given site...

If you have a product or service that is really unique it is totally likely that you could achieve higher traffic without ranking for that product keyword. Furthermore, the product keyword may not be a high competitive keyword in the first place

[study]

Thank you CainIV for the answers but I am still fascinated by how the website can generate such high traffic and achieving such relative high ranking in such short period of time without doing what most of us would do to promote a wesbite(such as using PPC, metatags and so on). If a wesbite doesn't even get listed in the top 10 pages of the S.E., how is it possible for it to get such high traffic? I thought that if a website is ranked high in the search results of the S.E., people will be able to find out about your website easily and hence increasing your traffic and your chance of make your website a success. After all, isn't this is what most people want to achieve(high ranking,high traffic) when they set up a website and use PPC campaigns such as Overture, Adwords etc. to promote their website?

The website that I talked about is in a highly competetive market and I wonder how is it possible to achieve such a great success in just a short period of time while some others websites (older and well-known) in that particular market have lesser traffic and some don't even rank in the top 100,000.

[caveman]

Study, there are all sorts of ways this could happen.

Your questions contain, IMO, some false assumtions so let's start there. As CainIV says, META tags don't count for much as rankings go, generally. They count a wee bit, just not much. I view them as more important with respect to snippets featured in some SE's, and in directories, where in both cases (SE's and directories) they can have a profound effect on CT's.

PPC also has little to do with rankings, except that as part of an integrated marketing effort, PPC can help get a site's awareness established, and good things can come from that, that lead to better rankings.

As for Alexa, though it has its uses and some of its uses are important, it's not a very reliable indicator of traffic. Its results can at times be very skewed. It depends on the category. Those who have Alexa toolbars are not representative of Web surfers at large. You should also know that some methods exist to artificially inflate Alexa rankings, though it's harder than it used to be.

As for traffic, you said something critical: "highly competetive market." In most cases, that also implies high traffic levels. My guess is that, since you're only talking about G, the site in question may have high rankings in the other major SE's. If that is so, and with a few clever shenanigans, a site could rank highly in Alexa without being very visible in G. Also, regarding G, you may also want to try to figure out if the site ranks for kw's other than those you're checking. For many sites, especially good ones, over 90% of total search traffic can come from longer tail search terms that are not the main one or two kw terms you first check.

And of course, SE's are not the only way to get traffic. In fact, there are IMO the weakest way. This new site, especially if it's doing well in a competitive category, was probably fielded by a team who really knows what they're doing. And they probably have all sorts of ways to get links and traffic into a new site. You'll have to trust me on that. ;-)

[study]

Thank you caveman for the answers and I hope you had an enjoyable weekend. If you don't mind, I wonder whether you can reply to these observations that I have made over the weekend about the website. First of all, the website doesn't show in the search results in Y!, MSN, Ask Jeeve, Mamma(which I believe are the major SEs that I can think of on the net now)using the kw(which is highly relevant to the business nature of that website) as I did with G, but what I found the strangest of all from my observation is that even after typing in the keyword of the website itself, the search results also doesn't show the website in those major SE.

Let me explain the statement above better by giving you an example. To protect the innocent ;), let's say the website is #*$!123.com and when I searched for #*$ which stands for the keyword in the domain name such as study as in study123(for argument sake, nothing to do with study123.com), the website doesn't show up in the major SEs(the ones that I have mentioned above)as well. If the website can generate such relative hugh amount of traffic in the timeframe I have mentioned and achieve such high ranking, what can we possibly learn from this website in order to make the marketing part of our websites as effective as that? If Alexa is not a reliable source for checking ranking and traffic for a website, can you please tell me which is the most or more reliable source for doing that? Thank you so much for your help in answering this post.

[caveman]

study, try searching on the domain itself in the SE's. Is it there? Also, try searching on some 2-3-4 word phrases you would expect the site to rank for.

If it's not coming up on any of the searches you might expect, then it's possible this is one of those examples of Alexa being gamed. I haven't looked into that in a while. It used to be relatively easy (we won't get into that here), but I don't think it's easy anymore. There is a lot of value in a good Alexa ranking, despite the at times very skewed nature of their results.

To be honest, if the site you're curious about ain't coming up in the SERP's of the SE's that matter, I don't know how much time I'd spend investigating it. Personally, I'd spend the time working on my sites.

[study]

Thank you caveman for the answers. Regarding your questions, I have to say that at first when I search for the full URL, it didn't show in the SERP and after a few days, the SERPs just show the #*$!123.com part of the URL. Is it possible for the guys of that website to manipulate the traffic and the ranking on Alexa? If so, is that mean that the traffic and the ranking of that website is not true, that there aren't that much traffic directed to that website and hence the ranking is false? Cheers, caveman for your help.