What is Alexa Ranking, How Does It Affect You & How Do You Improve Your Ranking!?

Alexa.com defines themselves as “the web information company,” but to webmasters and bloggers, they are so much more. Essentially, Alexa is a company that measures web traffic on almost every website on the internet through their increasingly popular toolbar plugin. This becomes an important element in leveraging your blog’s ranking as a sell point to advertisers, sponsors, buyers, readers and whoever else wants a piece of your material.

Why is this important? Alexa rankings can make or break your business.

Before you freak out, let me explain how this plays out. Essentially, the way Alexa.com is measuring your website’s traffic is one of the most unfair surveys around. Why? Well they only record hits on your blog if it passes through their systems… meaning that your visitors need either the Alexa.com toolbar installed or you need to have a widget displayed on your website.

Advantage internet/technology bloggers. As a whole, the tech readership crew is much more likely to have an Alexa toolbar installed than your typical user. What this means for non-tech focused websites is that they are going to be seen as having less traffic than others.

So I have less traffic according to some company… who cares!?
You need to start caring about your Alexa.com ranking if you aren’t already. As much as it pains me to say this, they have a monopoly over the sector. As advertisers move away from the unreliable “Google Pagerank” service, Alexa Ranking is the next logical sell point to move towards (and eventually destroy  ).

Your Alexa ranking is used as a big factor in valuing the advertising space on your website by, I would say, about 85% of advertisers. A higher positioning means more money in your pocket. Alexa rankings are being used increasingly to leverage blogs, despite the fact that the numbers can be horrendously manipulated. More high paying reviews, better advertising offers, more press coverage, it is a must have.

What can you do to improve your ranking?
So you have a less-than-stellar rating, don’t worry… you can improve and manipulate this pretty easily. Here are the top three things you should be doing, anything else is water under the bridge… so when you read a post “the top x ways to improve your Alexa ranking,” they are making most of it up out of thin air.

1.   Place an Alexa.com widget/plugin or chart on your website

2.   Install the Alexa toolbar on your own computer and encourage your readers to do the same on their computers

3.   Write popular content and get SEO optimized for traffic

Pretty self-explanatory, throw an Alexa widget up on your website. Why? This logs your visitors even if they don’t have a toolbar. Essentially, this can make up for visitors not having toolbars of their own (though not entirely). I have heard reports of HUGE gains after installing an Alexa chart or widget. They offer them to you on the website for free, so you should be taking advantage of their offer.

Other than that, you need to have the traffic to push your ranking up, so keep writing interesting content that is dense with information so you get the search engine positioning and page views that you need. Your ranking is based on your last three months of traffic average traffic, so while my weekly average is currently under 100,000, I am registering a 273,000 Alexa ranking. This will take some time, so be patient and keep writing. 

How to Increased My AlexaRank By More Than 25%

Here’s how my logic went – I figured the toolbar and other AlexaRank checking tools tell Alexa my browsing habits, which is fine, but I’m only one person visiting my blogs (albeit I do it many times each day). What I really want is a way to tell Alexa about every person who visits my blogs, not just me. In order to do this, the Alexa reporting tool needs to be on my blog and downloaded by every person who visits my site each time they visit.

The obvious answer was to install an Alexa Site Widget on each of my blogs. The widget looks like this:

If you click it you will be taken to my current Alexa traffic ranking data. You can also find the live widget in the sidebar of all my blogs.

After installing this widget on to my blogs, within the next few days my rankings increased at least 25%. This blog, Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, was sitting around the 19,000 AlexaRank mark and within seven days had dropped to just above 15,000 as I type this. Prior to this gain my AlexaRank increases had been slow and steady, but never as significant as this in a short period of time, unless of course I earned a traffic spike from some other site(s) linking to me.

I noticed similar results at SmallBusinessBranding.com and theBlogTrafficSchool.com Blog too, which makes me almost 100% certain that installing the Alexa site widget will increase your AlexaRank.

This makes complete sense, as my thinking above explains. If every visitor to your blog downloads the Alexa site widget when they visit your site, then Alexa has data on every visitor you have, at least every web reader, I don’t think RSS readers count since they never download the widget unless they go to your site. You might call this “gaming” your AlexaRank, but in this case I don’t think that’s an apt description – installing the site widget in fact helps to give Alexa enough data to provide your true AlexaRank, as opposed to what it thinks it should be based on the data it has from it’s toolbar users.

Alexa.com ranking is important, so you definitely shouldn’t underestimate its influence on your earnings. Don’t get freaked out if your rating isn’t so hot, because there is more to life on the web than statistics alone. But if you simply don’t care, you need to start caring because you are missing out on potential income by having a poor rank