Great ways to improve your Alexa rank

What is the Alexa Rank?

Put simply, the Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases its ranking schema on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who visit a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

Why good Alexa Ranking is must for your website?

*It provides credibility to your website. It is a bench mark used by Advertisers to gauge the popularity of your blog or website.
*It helps you to increase real visitors and thus quality clients or sponsors.
*It helps increase your sales because visitors will know your website is well established.
*It helps you to get better advertisement income.
*It will also get good returns as everyone wants to hire services of established professionals.
*It is must if you are serious about promoting your website.
*It helps you increase membership fee.
*It helps you promote your website better.

Great Ways to Improve Your Alexa Rank

1. Install Alexa Toolbar:

Since Alexa actually measures traffic from various users who use Alexa toolbar, doesn’t it make sense that you should also install Alexa toolbar in your browser? Yes, and in fact setting your blog as your homepage and loading it every day does help improve your Alexa rank to some extent. (However, constantly reloading your pages every minute/hour etc. won’t help you further increase your Alexa rank as Alexa counts a unique IP address once a day only).

2. Put Alexa Rank Widget On Your Website:

If you put Alexa Rank Widget on your webpage (like above), Alexa can more accurately rank your site as it can collect traffic information of all those visitors as well who do not use the Alexa toolbar!

3. Encourage Others To Use Alexa Toolbar:

You will notice an immediately boost in your Alexa ranking immediately if you can encourage your loyal site visitors such as friends, webmasters, etc. to use the Alexa toolbar.

4. Use Alexa Redirects:

I have found positive results with Alexa redirects. You can leave a redirected Alexa URL in blog comments, forum signatures, etc. with your site name as anchoring text. Instead of using http://www.blogtactic.com, all you need to do is redirect the webpage using http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/blogtactic.com

Alexa Redirects option such as http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.blogtactic.com is no longer practiced.

You can use this Alexa redirection in internal linking system as well, but be warned that it is said such redirects “may” have a negative impact on building internal and external links. So use it at your own discretion. (Also of note, this redirect will also count a unique IP address once a day so again clicking it multiple times won’t help at all.)

Alexa widgets can be located in their Webmaster's Corner section.

5. Concentrate On Bringing Webmasters Traffic:

This might make less sense but my logic is since many webmasters already have Alexa toolbar installed in their browser, if you can anyhow attract webmasters to visit your site, then you’ll really notice a big jump in your Alexa ranking. You can attract more webmasters to visit your site simply by joining webmasters forum or writing contents related to webmasters (such as writing on SEOs and SERPs), etc.

Another 20 Ways to Increase your Alexa Rank from DoshDosh

Here is a collection of methods you can use to boost your Alexa Rank. Most of these tips are derived from several fellow webmasters I know who claimed to have derived positive results through their experiments with the Alexa Rankings.

Some of the other tips were derived articles and sources, which I have duly referenced at the end of this post.

Do these tips work? According to some, yes they definitely do work. But do note that most of them require active effort of some sort and hence, they will work as long as long as you are consistently performing specific actions.

To increase your Alexa rank in the long run, I would highly recommended that one focus on developing quality content which attracts and maintains a large audience instead of purely focusing on artificially increasing your Alexa Rank.

Great link-worthy content will leads to an natural increase in site traffic and is an excellent way to passively increase your Alexa rank.

It is important to emphasize that you should devote most of your efforts in growing your site audience alongside integrated implementation of any of the following tips below.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.

2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day. According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.

3. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers. Be sure to link to Alexa’s full explanation of their toolbar and tracking system so your readers know what installing the toolbar or extension entails.

4. Work in an Office or own a company? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers. Perhaps it will be useful to note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPs are used.

5. Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.

6. Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.

7. Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters usually have the toolbar installed. You’ll get webmasters to visit your website and offer useful feedback. It’s also a good way to give back to the community if you have useful articles to share with others.

8. Write content that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.

9. Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.blogtactic.com . Replace blogtactic.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help. There is no official proof that redirects positively benefit your Alexa Rank, so use with caution. Redirect? no longer used by Alexa, instead use http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/blogtactic.com

10. Post in Asian social networking websites or forums. Some webmasters have suggested that East Asian web users are big Alexa toolbar fans, judging by the presence of several Asia-based websites in the Alexa Top 500. I suggest trying this only if you have the time or capacity to do so.

11. Create a webmaster tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often revisit your website to gain access to the tools.

12. Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop link worthy material.

13. Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic. Doubly useful when your ad is highly relevant to webmasters.

14. Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while helping you rank in the search engines.

15. Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget/graph at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.

16. Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster forums and websites. A prominent and well displayed ad will drive lots of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your rank.

17. Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or promote specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis. You can easily find posters for hire in Digital Point and other webmaster forums.

18. Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers. This might be difficult to arrange and isn’t really a viable solution for most. I’m keeping this one in because some have suggested that it does work.

19. Use MySpace . This is a little shady so I don’t recommended it unless you’re really interested in artificially inflating your Alexa Rank. Use visually attractive pictures or banners and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. This will be most effective if your website has content that is actually relevant to the MySpace Crowd.

20. Try Alexa auto-surfs. Do they work? Maybe for brand new sites. I think they are mostly suitable for new websites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so I suggest using with caution.


Concerns over Alexa rank information and the Alexa Toolbar

Alexa ranks sites based on visits from users of its Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer and from integrated sidebars in Mozilla and Netscape. In addition to their own statusbar extension, Sparky (released July 2007), there are several third-party extensions for Mozilla Firefox:

* SearchStatus shows Google PageRank and Alexa TrafficRank
* About This Site Firefox plug-in that shows metadata from Alexa TrafficRank.

There is some controversy over how representative Alexa's user base is of typical Internet behavior. If Alexa's user base is a fair statistical sample of the Internet user population (e.g., a random sample of sufficient size), Alexa's ranking should be quite accurate. In reality, not much is known about the sample and possible sampling biases. Alexa itself notes several examples. A known source of bias is the self-selecting, opt-in nature of Alexa traffic tracking software installation, but the significance of this bias on rankings is not reported.

On April 16, 2008 many users reported dramatic shifts in their Alexa rankings. Alexa confirmed this later in the day with an announcement that they had released the "New Alexa Ranking System" claiming that they now take into account more data sources.

Is Alexa widget a spyware

The Alexa toolbar is regarded by many vendors as spyware. Symantec classifies the toolbar as Trackware. McAfee Site Advisor rates the Alexa website as yellow with a warning, "In our tests, we found downloads on this site that some people consider adware, spyware or other potentially unwanted programs," and the site has 67 user ratings of "Adware, spyware, or viruses", as of July 2, 2008. The toolbar is detected by McAfee as Adware-Alexa, a "Potentially Unwanted Program". Many other security vendors also detect and remove Alexa software.