OK SEO knowledgeable people rip my theory apart

[Allie444]

I have a cousin who has become a millionaire selling machine parts on the web. In his industry the power of the internet hasn't been realized by his peers the way it has in ours. So on Christmas he looked at my sites and was surprised and impressed by how well they were doing. He liked all the inbound links from the wedding vendors I work with to my site. I guess in his industry it's hard to come by those. he had me install the Alexa toolbar and I have have been studying SEO since then.

According to ALEXA my site flowerallieweddings.com is ranking higher than just about any independent florist site I can find in the country. Even the big guys like Oberer's rank lower than me on Alexa.

How significant is this? I only ask because I am in the process of finding a new retail site right now and am expecting the same performance. I built flowerallieweddings.com myself from a template and can't imagine why I need to pay a whole bunch of money to a site company that doesn't perform as well.

Can someone help me make sense of this? By the way the company I am looking at is NOT Strider but is a company that has gotten some publicity in the industry lately.

 

[theRKF]

Allie,

Alexa data is marginally useful at best, since their traffic info comes primarily from their toolbar ... and their toolbar is used by techies. It's a very skewed data set.

In what areas do you see your site ranking higher? Is it simply traffic or some other metrics?

 

[Allie444]

As I said I don't know much and almost nothing about SEO so I don't even know how Alexa tracks. I would love to see how I rank for traffic. My main concern is that I have pretty much been the most popular wedding florist in Southern California for the last 5 years and I want to make sure I stay that way. How can I compare my site to my competitors???

 

[theRKF]

How can I compare my site to my competitors???

A few steps:
1) Build a list of keywords that are related to your site and drive a reasonable amount of traffic
2) Build a list of sites that rank well for those keywords
3) Use sites like Compete.com, Spyfu.com and Quantcast.com to compare traffic estimates

Then, you start going through the long list SEO items to review on your site. Matt McGee's little book is a good one to start with.

When you say you're the most popular wedding florist in SoCal, what are you basing that on? If you want to preserve something you need a metric(s) to track and benchmark.