If you are doing paid reviews , selling text links or anything that is related to advertising and making money online then it is important to improve your Alexa rank. Although I have a decent Alexa rank ( around 130,000 ) I never gave much thought about actively trying to improve it. I really started to take some interest in it only after I joined Performancing Ads and started browsing there blog inventory. They were listed according to the Alexa rank and my blog was way down. I checked out some paid review and link selling sites and Alexa rank was a considered in there pricing as well , so it is safe to say if you are interested in making money online you should give some thought to your Alexa rank.
What is Alexa rank and is it accurate ?
According to the Alexa website Alexa traffic rank is based upon three months historical data collected from Alexa toolbar users and other diverse traffic sources. Its not clear what this diverse traffic sources are but the Alexa toolbar usages is a big factor in your Alexa rank. Webmasters and Internet marketers are the ones who are most likely to have the toolbar installed so if your blog is related to web master tools , search engine optimization or Internet marketing your chance of getting a good Alexa rank is pretty high. Because of this bias towards the web master's it isn't a very reliable measure of a blog or web sites traffic but since most money making sites consider it as a metric you should work on improving it. Even the Alexa site says that it is not a very reliable metrics.
The traffic data are based on the set of tool bars that use Alexa data, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. To the extent that our sample of users differs from the set of all Internet users, our traffic estimates may over- or under-estimate the actual traffic to any particular site.- Alexa
How to improve your Alexa traffic ranking
- The very first thing you have to do is install the Alexa toolbar. If you are an Internet Explorer user ( you really should switch to FireFox ) you have no option but to install the toolbar which I find bit bandwidth consuming. If you are a FireFox user then you can use the Searchstatus Firefox plugin which give you more information and functionality like highlighting nofollow links etc.
- Adding an Alexa widget to your website - According to some, visitors need to click this to count as a visit but some say having the widget is enough , I did see a slight increase in my rank after adding the widget. Also if you have some decent Alexa rank showing it off can get some advertisement deals as well.
- Promoting your posts on Digg , Stumbleupon - Digg and Stumbleupon are two sites webmasters visit frequently so getting popular on them will get you some webmaster heavey traffic giving you a nice boost in your Alexa rank.
- Frequent in webmaster forums - I guess its obvious that webmasters frequent webmaster forums. Actively participation in forums will give you some great Alexa friendly traffic.
There are many other ways including some shady methods to improve your Alexa ranking. 20 quick tips to improve your Alexa ranking have some additional methods mentioned in that post. While these methods will give you a slight boost in your Alexa traffic rank continuously producing good original content is the best way to keep improving your Alexa rank.
I will be submitting this post to the group writing project at Problogger. Its a great way to get some exposure , traffic and back links to your blog.
Found your post through problogger. Nice ideas. I’ll definitely check out the firefox plugin; that one is new to me.
There are billions of web pages and though most of them are spams but the good ones I mean the quality and contentful blogs never reat in alexa rankings coz of proper traffic. This is painful for every blogger
Your title on problogger drew me because I am interested in knowing more about Alexa ratings. We only recently monetized our blog and I am still pretty clueless about the whole thing. We are traveling the world as a family ( going on our 3rd year) living large on very little, so I have lots to share, but everything is a big learning curve as I am computer illiterate. We are moving so not that much time to be plugged in either. Slowly I learn..thanks for this!
Nice post covering about alexa. I check sometimes alexa but not too often. but i think it is one of the important measures to check the traffic of a website.
Thanks,
Nihar
I must admit, I am not putting too much effort in Alexa and PR but of course I increase my links and make sure they’re of good quality.
Actually, I am surprise that both of my blogspot blogs are PR3.
Thanks for sharing anyway.
PS. Thanks also for reading and leaving a comment on my entry at Problogger. He’s really among the top bloggers I admire.
@Jo,
SearchStatus is a great plug-in with lots of features , you should definitely try it out.
@Abishek
Alexa is a bit skewed towards tech oriented blogs , its unfair I know
@soultraveller
You are welcome , with a PR4 and a good Alexa rank you want have trouble monetizing your blog
@Nihar , Angel
Concentrate on improving traffic and Alexa will improve automatically. But adding the above plug-ins can give you a little extra boost.
The forums one is a good idea, but you’ve got to be careful not to share too much with other webmasters on these type of forums. Scams run rampant on even great forums such as digital point including ones where people try to get you banned from Google AdSense because of jealousy.
However, even if you don’t get a higher Alexa ranking, you’ll probably still learn a lot from these types of forums since seconds after something big on the internet happens (such as Google’s two weeks of not crawling on blogspot blogs) you’ll hear about it there. Also, I learned a LOT about SEO at Digital Point… if not for Digital Point I’d have never heard of SEO!
Hi, like others, I too found you via ProBlogger. To be honest, I am not concerned about Alexa because I don’t sell links but try and get as many quality incoming backlinks as possible. However, several of my posts have been promoted via social media sites so that should improve my overall Alexa rank.
Nice tip and yes Alexa is cool but shouldn’t be the only thing one looks for as some people get too serious about that. And as for sharing too much information it’s nice to know there are people who don’t like keeping things to themselves.
I have installed Alexa widget in my blog already but I think the increase is coming more from the numbers of our visitors. As the visitors increase, our Alexa rank will increase also. One of my post about Alexa Rank and daily unique visitor estimation shows that Alexa Rank increases as our visitors traffic increase. Alexa Rank is much simpler to understand rather than Google Page Rank I guess.
@Online Writer,
Yep , its mostly about getting traffic , but adding the Alexa widget definitely helps , visited your blog , great post about Analyzing web sites using Alexa rank
This is a great post, fortunately 70% of the time of website owner is consumed in experimenting towards increasing page rank and alexa rank. To start with increasing page rank one must start with downloading Alexa toolbar for IE or firefox on as many system possible. as a second step alexa widget on every page of your website, by this way every webpage opened is counted while calculating rank inspite is user does not have alexa toolbar installed knowtheworldaround.com
@slym,
if you have added in in the sidebar , doesn’t that count as in every page ? I think the most important thing that counts towards Alexa is the number of unique visitors , however it is a very poor way to measure the traffic to a website but still it is important in getting advertising.
For monetizing your blog alexa ranking is very important. Alexa rank a website according to the number of visitors visit that site with alexa toolbar installed. If you want to increase earning from your blog then you have to increase alexa ranking. Advertising network like Text link ads, pay per post, sponsored review etc judge blog quality according to the alexa rank. There are some techniques by using which you can increase alexa rank. Download and installing alexa toolbar is basic for increasing alexa ranking.
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