The Alexa Ranking Explanation

There are several important website ranking services on the Internet. Since most of us already know what Google Page Rank is, then in this post, I am going to share with you another popular website ranking service called Alexa ranking.

In this post, you will learn about:

• What is Alexa Ranking
• Why use Alexa Ranking
• What other Features Alexa Offers?
• Check out Alexa Ranking of those Popular Sites
• Why Alexa Ranking Information is Invaluable?

All this will help you build a better blog, know the competition, know where the traffic source are coming from and know what are those keywords that brings in traffic to the top blogs and to our own blog.

WHAT IS ALEXA RANKING

Alexa ranking is not uncommon for those of you who have been blogging for several months or years. It is a website ranking standard that we will normally refer to to get ranking information about our blog as compared to other blogs. This is very important because Alexa ranking serves as a fast check on how well our blog perform on the Internet.

WHY USE ALEXA RANKING

Alexa ranking is by far the easiest and fastest way to know the ranking of our blog. By using Alexa ranking, you can track your blog ranking each and everyday. Alexa ranking is like a tool for us to know how fast is our blog overtaking other blogs.

Imagine that your blog is like driving a car and Alexa ranking serves as your speedometer but this speedometer shows that your blog is moving up raking faster if the values it shows is smaller.

For example:
You blog's Alexa rank yesterday: 1,802,302
Today, you check again, the rank: 1,705,800

So, you know that your blog is moving up in Alexa rank. It moves up by 96,502 in once day. That is an amazing improvement in Alexa ranking.

WHAT OTHER FEATURES DOES ALEXA OFFERS?

Alexa tells you your blog ranking. Other than that, it also tells you some other important factors that will improve your blog Alexa rank. Some of the important factors that will affect your Alexa rank are:

• Sites linking in
• Search queries (Normally, we called as keywords)
• Traffic Stats
• Regional Traffic ranking
• Site loading time
• Way back machine (A tool to go back to the history of a site, it works like a time machine to go back in time.)
• and more...

Personally, I find that the most useful features that Alexa offers are sites linking in and search queries. These 2 factors can be considered as the major factors affecting the Alexa ranking of our blog. I will write more about how to improve Alexa ranking soon. Please stay tuned for the tips for better Alexa ranking.

CHECK OUT ALEXA RANKING OF THOSE POPULAR SITES

When you go to Alexa website, you can click on "Top Sites". You will find the sites below are listed as the top sites in Alexa rank. These sites are those that we know.

• Google: Global rank No.1
• Facebook: Global rank No.2
• YouTube: Global rank No.3
• Yahoo!: Global rank No.4

You can see their source of traffic, the sites linking in and the search queries. Those are invaluable information about the sites. This is especially important when you are starting a new site that works almost like these top sites.

WHY ALEXA RANKING INFORMATION IS INVALUABLE?

If you are creating a search engines that works like Google or Yahoo!, then these information will be very useful for you. You can see what sites are linking to Google and Yahoo! and of course, you can see what are the queries that are most searched. This way you can create your search engines by using all these information.

This works for our blogs as well. We can see what other blogs are better as compared to our blogs. We can see the queries that relate to those blogs and we can see the sites linking back to them. We can do the same as well.

So, is Alexa ranking important? That is up to you to decide. I would say it is very useful and the information are indeed helpful to build a better blog. And, the sure thing is that, by using information on Alexa's website, we can be sure that our blog are properly optimize and we can get traffic to our blog.

You can visit Alexa's website: Alexa.com

Cells are crawling all over our bodies, but how?

 by Biomechanism 

For better and for worse, human health depends on a cell’s motility –– the ability to crawl from place to place. In every human body, millions of cells –are crawling around doing mostly good deeds ––– though if any of those crawlers are cancerous, watch out.

Caption: This is an electron microscope image of two crawling worm sperm magnified ~5,000X. Credit: Courtesy, Tom Roberts, FSU Dept. of Biological Science

“This is not some horrible sci-fi movie come true but, instead, normal cells carrying out their daily duties,” said Florida State University cell biologist Tom Roberts. For 35 years he has studied the mechanical and molecular means by which amorphous single cells purposefully propel themselves throughout the body in amoeboid-like fashion ––absent muscles, bones or brains.

Meanwhile, human cells don’t give up their secrets easily. In the body, they use the millions of tiny filaments found on their front ends to push the front of their cytoskeletons forward. In rapid succession the cells then retract their rears in a smooth, coordinated extension-contraction manner that puts inchworms to shame. Yet take them out of the body and put them under a microscope and the crawling changes or stops.

But now Roberts and his research team have found a novel way around uncooperative human cells.

In a landmark study led by Roberts and conducted in large part by his then-FSU postdoctoral associate Katsuya Shimabukuro, researchers used worm sperm to replicate cell motility in vitro –– in this case, on a microscope slide.

Doing what no other scientists had ever successfully done before, Shimabukuro disassembled and reconstituted a worm sperm cell, then devised conditions to promote thecell’s natural pull-push crawling motions even in the unnatural conditions of a laboratory. Once launched, the reconstituted machinery moved just like regular worm sperm do in a natural setting –– giving scientists an unprecedented opportunity to watch it move.

Roberts called his former postdoc’s signal achievement “careful, clever work” –– and work it did, making possible new, revealing images of cell motility that should help to pinpoint with never-before-seen precision just how cells crawl.

“Understanding how cells crawl is a big deal,” Roberts said. “The first line of defense against invading microorganisms, the remodeling of bones, healing wounds in the skin and reconnecting of neuronal circuits during regeneration of the nervous system –– all depend on the capacity of specialized cells to crawl.

“On the downside, the ability of tumor cells to crawl around is a contributing factor in the metastasis of malignancies,” he said. “But we believe our achievements in this latest round of basic research could eventually aid in the development of therapies that target cell motility in order to interfere with or block the metastasis of cancer.”

Funding for Robert’s worm-sperm study came from the National Institutes of Health. The findings are described in a paper (“Reconstitution of Amoeboid Motility In Vitro Identifies a Motor-Independent Mechanism for Cell Body Retraction”) published online in the journal Current Biology.

Caption: This is Florida State University cell biologist Tom Roberts. Credit: Florida State University

Why worm sperm?

For one thing, said Roberts, the worm sperm is different from most cells in that itdoesn’t use molecular motor proteins to facilitate its contractions; it shimmies along strictly by putting together and tearing down its tiny filaments. And the simple worm sperm makes a good model because, while it is similar to a human cell it has fewer moving parts, making it less complicated to take apart and reassemble than, say, brain or cancer cells.

Armed with the newfound ability to reconstitute amoeboid motility in vitro, cell biologists such as Roberts may be able to learn the answers to some major moving questions. Among them: How can some cells continue to crawl even after researchers have disabled their supply of myosin, the force-producing “mover protein” that functions like a motor to help power muscle and cell contraction?

For Roberts and his team, the next move will be to determine if what they’ve learned about worm sperm also applies to more conventional crawling cells, including tumor cells.

“As always, there will be more questions,” Roberts said. “Are there multiple mechanisms collaborating to drive cell body retraction? Is there redundancy built into the motility systems?”  Share your opinion using our Facebook commenting box below.

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Co-authors of the Current Biology paper include Roberts, a professor in the FSU Department of Biological Science; Shimabukuro, a former FSU postdoctoral associate in biology who now is a research scientist at the Japan Science and Technology Agency; Naoki Noda, of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass.; and Murray Stewart, of the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.

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