Kishalaya

If you have been monetizing your site, or are using Internet Marketing to promote your site then you would have heard about alexa. Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com and it provides traffic information of websites. Alexa rank is measured according to the volume of users visiting the website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

If you have better alexa ranking you can bargain well with most of the networks like reviewme and text link ads which base their rates on the Alexa rankings.

So increasing the Alexa ranking is the basic view point for all the webmasters, be it new or pro.

I just stumbled upon an excellent article about how to improve alexa ranking, and I am trying to implement the same on my site and will update you of its results.

I have chosen some of the important techniques mentioned in the above article and sites around, which are listed 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.
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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very good example.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. Ask your visitors to make your site their browser’s home page. You could even include instructions on how to do this with different browsers. Bring them back with incentives. Regularly updated and informative content is a great incentive for visitors to keep coming back for more.

What do you think about alexa? Are you using similar techniques or some different ones? Do share your experience here