The T-Shirt Blog

In It 2 Win It

Posted on January 19th, 2008 by Alex.
Categories: Strictly For Webmasters
Tags: blog, awards

I just submitted the blog to a couple of blog award sites. I’m not expencting to win an award of anything, I’m simly hoping to get some additional exposure, especially at Blogger’s Choice Awards which has a shopping blog category. I’d be thrilled to receive your support in terms of votes, and if you’re a blogger you might want to submit your own blog as well. If you are indeed a blogger I also recommend a list of top 10 blog awards from Mashable along with this list of top blogs about blogging.

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Strictly For Webmasters

Posted on January 15th, 2008 by Alex.
Categories: Geeky tees, Strictly For Webmasters
Tags: alexa, rankings, traffic, webmasters

So far I’ve mainly written about t-shirts from a consumer point of view, but I’ve secretly wanted to create a subsection of this blog that deals with issues faced by webmasters, t-shirt designers, and anyone involved in selling or publishing t-shirts online, in particular because that’s something I am involved in myself. I run several other t-shirt related sites, actively work on advertising campaigns, and have created several t-shirt designs (with more on the way). Given that a significant part of my visitors are actively involved in running t-shirt related sites I feel like I have a ready made audience who could benefit from the topic, and vice versa. So expect to see more posts about things like search engine optimisation, website promotion, search marketing (ppc), and other issues pertaining to running a website and attracting visitors.

My first topic for webmasters has to do with Alexa.com and and the issue of measuring a site’s populary relative to other websites. (If you already know all about Alexa you might want to skip the rest of this post). Before I explain to you what I find so useful about Alexa’s website rankings, let me ask you a question:

Have you ever looked at another website and wondered how much traffic it gets?

It might be a competitor’s website, an industry leader like Busted Tees or Threadless, or maybe a blog who’s readership (or lack thereof) you are wondering about. The reality is, that, short of asking, there is no real way of knowing how much traffic another website gets, and here’s where Alexa comes in. Alexa is a tool that ranks websites sites in order of traffic. So, for example, Yahoo.com is number #1, Google.com is #2, YouTube.com is #3, and Facebook is #6 as you can see for yourself at Alexa’s main page. The rankings are straightforward - while we don’t know exactly how many visitors or pageviews these sites get, we can see that Yahoo gets the most visitors, Google is just behind, and YouTube follows in third place. A quick search for my site reveals that thetshirtblog.com is ranked… #533,515 as of this minute.

Personally I use the Alexa toolbar for Internet Explorer and the Alexa plugin for Firefox to instantly see the Alexa ranking of any website I visit, just like in this screenshot:

So at this point you are probably wondering, how does Alexa gets it’s rankings? Furthermore, are those rankings accurate and are there any caveats? Well, hold those questions until the end of the article, because it’s time for some tees! Did you really think you were going to read through a full post from The T-Shirt Blog without seeing a single t-shirt? Don’t you realize, t-shirts are the glue that holds the universe together, and permeate everything we see and do! Ok, maybe not, but these customized Alexa tees showcase your site’s ever changing Alexa ranking with the help of Zazzle’s API:

And now for the nitty-gritty on Alexa’s rankings.

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