Fred Thompson pulls into 2nd place behind... Ron Paul?

Now that Fred Thompson has (finally) officially announced that he is running for the presidency, we can check his Web site's Alexa stats to see how popular he is with the online crowd. It turns out that he is popular. Here is the graph of the republican candidates:

That red line with the big spike... that is Fred08.com. The spike in Fred Thompson's graph occurred on the day that he announced his candidacy on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno while the other candidates were having yet another televised debate. Apparently, skipping the debate to hang out with Jay Leno paid off.

Another thing to notice is the jump on Ron Paul's popularity. His online traffic is represented by the blue line. He struck a chord with viewers of the debates and was declared the hands-down winner in a Fox news poll, which gave him quite an impressive lift online, further securing his impressive lead over the other candidates. The "leading" republican candidates, Romney, McCain and Guiliani... not so much. Their online traffic continues to come in at a trickle.

The race is on... let's see if Fred can catch Ron Paul.

What is more popular online, golf or tennis?

Tennis was very popular when I was growing up. We had all the big stars like Connors, McEnroe and Borg. And the ladies were popular too, with Evert and Navratilova. Golf on the other hand was much less popular. Tennis waxed and Golf waned.

Over the last 10 years or so, courses have changed. Golf is very popular now and tennis.... not so much.

I was looking at our movers and shakers today and noticed that usopen.org was on the list. Is that golf or tennis? Turns out that usopen.org is tennis, while usopen.com is golf. Confusing huh? On a whim I plotted the two on a graph and reset the time range to "max." Guess who's more popular?

Tennis.

Turns out that for as long as we've tracked them the Tennis US Open has been more popular than the Golf US Open. Take a look at the graph. In fact, the disparity between the two has been increasing pretty dramatically over the last 4 years to the point that the usopen.org is now getting approximately 4 times the number of visitors as the usopen.com.

I really had no idea that tennis would be more popular and am at a loss to explain why. Is tennis more of a "stats" oriented sport that attracts people to the Web site? Does tennis do a better job of promoting their site to the television audience? Or is tennis just simply providing a better site?

Anybody want to take a side bet on wimbledon.org vs usopen.org? Here's the graph.

ATTN: Sales & BizDev. Alexa Just Got More Useful.

For years sales, bizdev and marketing folks have used Alexa to identify sites in their target market and contact them. Alexa has been great at the first half of that equation -- identifying sites -- and poor at the second half. The contact info available on Alexa has been meager at best.

Now, we have partnered with Jigsaw to complete the equation. 500,000 websites come with enhanced contact information via Jigsaw.

Here's an example: Let's say you are looking at the social networking space and via Alexa you have determined that you should be working with hi5.com. They are a high traffic site and one of the leaders in the space. How do you contact hi5.com? Go to Alexa's Overview page for Hi5 (here) and you'll see links to the Jigsaw contact info right there.

Or, let's say your are in the mapping space. You have looked at Alexa's Related links, and gone through the directory to find all of the most popular sites that have online maps. You decide that you need to get in touch with Mapquest. Go to Alexa's Overview page for Mapquest (here) and you'll see links to over 50 contacts at Mapquest sorted by department and by level.

Give it a shot. I hope you are as impressed with the Jigsaw data as I am.

How to Boost Your Alexa Rank

I see this line in blogs just about every day: "How to boost your Alexa Rank." They are inevitably filled with misguided musings posted by fools who can't be bothered to learn the facts before blathering about some get-rich-quick scheme.

Here's a perfect example. In this blog post, he says you can boost your rank EASILY by following his simple steps. That post was from August 9th, so he should be in the top 100 by now, right? Wrong. In fact, he barely cracked the Top 100,000. But, his rank did go up... did his scheme work? No, of course not. It is just that people who have the Alexa Toolbar noticed his post and visited his site, pushing his rank up.

Then there are the blogs that tell you to put one of our Alexa Widgets on your site. They all claim that your rank will improve dramatically. But, of course, it doesn't work. That would be ridiculous, right? But you wouldn't know that if you read these blogs.

Of course we can't forget the people who will charge you to increase your rank. I wonder how much money these services have made over the years. I can tell you with absolute certainty, that you may as well burn your money in a voodoo traffic pyre while chanting "Alexa" over and over. Maybe that will work. But these programs definitely don't and you can look at their traffic rank as proof. If that isn't enough to convince you, how about this... even trying to boost your rank through these means is resorting to fraud. That is no way to run a business. And for those wicked souls who recommend pinging, port scanning or crawling our site to boost your rank, cut it out. Hacking our site is not just a waste of time, it is a crime .

If you want to know how the rankings actually work, you can visit this page here.

So, how do you increase your Alexa Rank? Get more traffic to your site. It is that simple. Write that in your blogs. It might not get you as many readers as "Increase your Rank in 3 Easy Steps" but at least it will be true.