J David Macor

I have had my own fare share of problems trying to increase my traffic. And my Alexa rank was one area that was an especially glaring problem. When I first found out that Alexa even existed, my rank was in the 300,000’s. Now my rank is near 170,000. It is still nothing to brag about, but it definitely is a marked improvement. I have scoured the web looking for tips on how to further increase my rank and I thought I might share some of these tips with you. I will also show you my results in a later post.

What the Hell is an Alexa?

Ah yes. Even after I found out that Alexa existed, I still wasn’t entirely sure what they did. I knew that they were somehow affiliated with Amazon, but beyond that, I didn’t know much. Perhaps they can best describe themselves:

Founded in April 1996, Alexa Internet grew out of a vision of Web navigation that is intelligent and constantly improving with the participation of its users. Along the way Alexa has developed an installed based of millions of toolbars, one of the largest Web crawls and an infrastructure to process and serve massive amounts of data. For users of Alexa’s Toolbar and web site this has resulted in products that have revolutionized Web navigation and intelligence. For developers this has resulted in a set of tools unprecedented in scope allowing whole new services to be created on the Alexa data and platform.

They are a primary and credible source for ranking websites. Your popularity and even your advertising revenue depends heavily on this number. As to how it is calculated, again I know that their toolbar is crucial, but beyond that, I did not know much. Let’s hear what Alexa has to say on the matter:

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.

The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users)

How To Increase Your Alexa Rank

Now for the tips! Naturally, you don’t have to follow all of this advice; you may even want to be very weary of certain methods (autosurfs…). But in the end, there should be some kind of increase in your Alexa rank.

• Install the Alexa toolbar and make your website the homepage.
  (Internet Explorer Download | Firefox Download)
   
• Tell all 3 of your friends to download the toolbar as well! Ok, hopefully you have more than 3 friends.
   
• If you work in a friendly office environment, get them to install the toolbar on every computer.
   
• Try to find and pay other companies (internet cafe’s, other companies) to install the toolbar along with your homepage.
   
• Join an Alexa link train (much like a Technorati link train).
   
• Write a post about Alexa!
   
• Write a post about a top Alexa site and mention that fact.
   
• Have your buddies review your website on Alexa.
   
• Add your URL to everything! Email, forums, business cards, etc.
   
• Put an Alexa rank widget on your blog.
   
• Use Alexa redirects (http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.jdavidmacor.com) in place of your url.
   
• Create some sort of webmaster tools page.
   
• Use Alexa autosurfs (does not play nice with adsense).
   
• Suggest related content for your site.
   
• List yourself on every directory you can find.
   
• Answer questions on Yahoo Answers with convenient links to your content.
   
• Show only post excerpts on your homepage; 1 users will give you 2 impression.
   

And remember, don’t be discouraged if your ranking doesn’t make giant leaps; especially if your site doesn’t focus on content for webmasters. Alexa is inherently biased towards that type of content, so if your niche is elsewhere, you might never see dramatic results.