For most web designers and web developers Internet Explorer 6 is considered to be one of the worst things unleased on the internet. The IE 6 browser was released back in 2001, and has a long list of problems that I won't go into detail with here. So back in 2001 IE6 was great right, well yeah, but now it is 8 years old and by any technology standard that it is old hat.

Modern web browsers such as IE 7, Firefox, and Safari provide significantly better online experiences for users. Since IE 6 usage has finally dipped below a small minority threshold of our customers, it's time to finally move beyond the ancient IE 6 browser.

E6 is no longer supported by Microsoft and there are a number of other free browsers that are vastly superior, yet something like 35% of all internet users still use IE6 even though it just takes minutes to upgrade to a better browser!

Many web designers and site owners get caught up in the influence of two main factors of SEO, Googles Rank and the Alexa Ranking. First of all what are they? Google PageRank is Google's way of deciding a webpage importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determine a page ranking in the search results. It measures a pages importance by considering multiple factors.

Alexa rankings rate a site for the traffic which has visited over a period of months. This gives a stable realistic view of a site measure of traffic and how it ranks compared to other sites.

Now whatever the site we all want it to rank well, increase traffic and make us more money, but which ranking is more important. Recently we refreshed our designlots.com website and had a burst of traffic. Our Alexa ranking climbed considerably, traffic was up by 30,000%, sounds impressive but is really happening.

There are many ways to generate traffic and promote your website online, some you have to pay for but here are some free ones. 5 highly effective techniques you can start using to increase website traffic and get an edge.

• Write articles, reports and reviews for other websites to publish, there are plenty of Blogs out there, and then put your website address in the by-line. If you can write good articles, something people are genuinely interested in, this will generate traffic.