According to Alexa.com, the web information company that ranks web sites worldwide and in the United States, Trajanstudio.com now ranks in the low 700,000s world wide, and in the low 100,000s in the United States. It is important to remember that there are many millions of web sites world wide and in the United States, and that the lower the number on Alexa, the higher the ranking is in terms of numbers of hits on a daily basis. That, my friends, is in the top 2.5 percentile!

Trajan Studio llc is a small, two-room operation in semi-rural and highly historic Abingdon, Virginia, population around 8,000. How, you might ask, did Trajan, with its skeleton crew, rise so meteorically in the rankings?

Before we go any farther, let’s define Alexa in terms of its rating significance: in order to get rated on Alexa, those clicking on your site must have the Alexa toolbar installed. Typically, folks who have this toolbar are tuned into who’s who on the Internet: who is big, who is not, and why. This includes webmasters and designers and search engine people, but it also includes other people interested in the rating statistics for other reasons, so while there are a lot of Internet geeks in Alexa’s audience, that’s not all there is out there watching what is happening in the world of rankings.

It is important to remember that fellow professionals make a critical bunch: it is not easy to impress them, so if your site’s ranking is high among them, it likely took some considerable doing to get there. It took finesse, integrity and hard work – and a lot of very rich, very useable and click-able content – to get there. You can’t just make it to the top on links and keywords and bot mechanisms that inflate your ratings artificially. In other words, you cannot cheat in this game. No, you’ve got to have vision, be fearless, and of course write some really good content.

In other words, it takes teamwork and while recognizing that each member of the crew has a uniquely valuable contribution without which that ship just doesn’t sail, an abiding respect for each other and above all, the customer. After all, this rising tide floats all boats, and Trajan’s customers stand to benefit from this rating, too.

The end result must be consistent, and professionals and casual surfers alike must find interesting, informative reading to hold their interest. This must all be presented in a way that flows easily and naturally from place to place during navigation, and it must work flawlessly, with nary a technical hitch. Voila! Top 2.5 percent…

Some notable rankings in Abingdon as of 06.03.10:

- Barter Theatre - RANK low 1 million
- Martha Washington Inn - RANK low 3 million
- Virginia Highlands Festival - RANK low 3 million
- Town of Abingdon - RANK mid 4 million
- Southwest Virginia Education Center - RANK low 5 million
- William King Museum - RANK high 12 million

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