I was checking the Alexa rankings of a few of my sites today, and was surprised to find just how far off the mark they are.

This site, for example, ranks something like 1.3 million in the world -- not bad, actually, considering the billions of websites out there and considering that I do precisely zero to promote this site. One of my other sites, with about the same amount of traffic as this one, ranks somewhere around 600,000. My "Big Dog" site, the one that gets ten times as much traffic as this or the other site in question, ranks around 800,000.

OK, the verdict is in: Free Traffic System works... pretty well.

I tested the free version of the system on three different sites for three different sets of keywords. One set of keywords was ridiculously competitive, one moderately competitive, and one not so competitive. I did no other link building during the month that I used Free Traffic System.

The results:

Go full-nerd and read on...

Just wanted to let everyone know that I have been busy with other stuff and have taken a short break from this blog. I will be back soon (like, within the next couple of days).

Before getting to the main point, let's muse on backlinking, shall we?

OK, so it's official: Inbound links are important, maybe not as important as quality content, but important nonetheless.

Two backlinking tools that won't sully your white hat (too much)

OK, both of the tools and methods I'm about to recommend work well. They work so well that -- disclosure -- I became an affiliate of each of them.

Video marketing on the Internet is a widely untapped and vastly misunderstood resource. Notice that I use the word "untapped." It's not as if it's not being done on a broad scale; it's just not being done effectively.

Let me clear up a few points by doing a little FAQ on the subject.

What is video marketing?

Using video distributed via Internet to reach your market and tell a compelling story about your brand, product or service -- that is the short definition.

How does it differ from other forms of marketing?

For the first time, U.S. businesses will spend more of their ad dollars in digital/new media than in newspapers and magazines.

I'm only surprised that it took this long. Who pays any attention to ads in newspapers or magazines these days? What's more, who buys that way?

Back in the day, people actually used to pick up the phone and order items they saw advertised in magazines. Or they would send away for something because of an ad they saw in the newspaper. Do people still do that?

The New York State Senate website is now powered by Drupal. It's a feature-rich, dynamic, interactive, multimedia Web 2.0 site. The performance is smooth and quick, and I am sure that there is plenty of secure access control involved. I'm glad to see that my tax dollars are being deployed wisely.

I'm going to share a link-building strategy (not specific tactics) that has worked exceedingly well for me when it comes to driving traffic to a website. This will not work for everyone because, frankly, few can produce content of high enough quality to make this strategy feasible.

(If you think you're tough enough to hang with this, you need to keep reading.)

It's not like I need another browser. Before installing Chrome, my sweet Fedora 11 rig was equipped with (in order of favorite to least favorite) Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Safari, and the ultra-crappy Internet Explorer (under Wine -- why does anyone use this piece of junk? Oh, right, because they're under some kind of spell that makes them blind to the vast world beyond Microsoftie stuff... anyway...). I also keep Lynx around for fun. To me the true test of good web design is this: It's worth browsing the site in Lynx; the site works.

So anyway, I don't need another browser.