Alexa who?
Alexa.com is owned by Amazon.com. In short (for those that don’t know), it’s ONE method of demonstrating traffic levels for your website. There are pro’s and con’s to Alexa and we’ll get to them in a minute.
What is this all about?
I have recently proposed a number of ways to potentially increase Alexa rank for some external SEO clients but it’s not something I have ever actively worried about for my company sites. As an experiment and to prove/disprove the theories, I am hoping (with your help) to test it once and for all and to provide all of the resources and information I can on improving your Alexa rank.
How is the rank measured?
In short, your Alexa rank is determined by the number of visitors who access your site and have the Alexa Toolbar installed (get it by clicking the link). The more visitors you get, the better your rank will be.
Obviously it’s a rank and not a score. Therefore #1 is far better than #200. For the top 100,000 sites measured, Alexa will also display traffic details (as a percentage of the traffic measured).
How can I take part in this?
Simple, download the firefox or internet explorer Alexa toolbar, browse this site a little and head over to this Alexa page which will display the original rank and the current real-time rank.
Is this helping you?
Yes, I’m not going to lie about it, by you doing this, you will be helping to increase the Alexa ranking of this site. If you think that this site doesn’t merit that increase then disable the toolbar when you are here, or remove it altogether. That said, I spend a lot of time trying to help others (including in this post and experiment) so if you value the free advice, tools and code then help us to prove the theories.
What’s in it for me?
Aha, the crux of the issue :D. I will return the favour for anyone that helps us out. If you take part in the experiment and you would like me to send traffic to your site in recompense then no problem. Follow the instructions above and then post a comment that starts “I took part in the experiment” and a brief synopsis of your site content. Assuming it is suitable for all ages, I will post your comment and visit your site myself. If I like it I may even blog about it :). If I particularly like your site I’ll a) add it to our links or b) link to you from this article depending on the content.
How to improve your Alexa Ranking:
- You have to install the Alexa toolbar or the firefox sparky extension.
By installing the toolbar, every time you visit your site you will be helping to increase your ranking. Likewise, that of the other sites you visit. Setting your website to your browser homepage will equally help to improve your ranking. - Actively encourage your users to download the alexa toolbar
Particularly if your site has regular visitors, you will be gaining repeat visits and increasing your rank - Focus your content
One of the potential downsides of alexa is that it’s primarily biased towards webmasters and bloggers. (and techies generally) as these are the people interested in Alexa rankings and therefore most likely to install the toolbar. Content which attracts these demographics will likely increase your ranking. - Digging/getting Dugg
Digg is pretty well known (if you like this article please digg it at the top of the page). Digg will generally bring a good number of visitors to your site and therefore the percentage of likely Alexa users increases (as well as the overall number of visitors). Perhaps it’s how you arrived here and therefore you can already see the effect. - Get family/colleagues to review your site with the toolbar installed
Are you a sysadmin or IS employee? You could install the toolbar across your office or NOC, be careful doing things you shouldn’t though! If it’s your own company, go for it!
As I said before, if you take part in this experiment you will get a greater understanding of Alexa, help us to prove/disprove a number of theories we are using to test these (and many more) alexa improvement ideas and if you post a comment with your URL I will do my best to help increase your traffic and Alexa rank too.
Alexa rank resources:
20 ways to increase your Alexa rank
Increase your alexa rank in one day
Comment posters’ sites I like: Coming soon
Add a comment with a description of your site and I’ll visit and (content permitting) add it to the post.
May 16th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
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May 18th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Hi,
There seems to be a small problem in your Alexa Monitoring Page. The page shows your original Alexa Rank correctly. but for the current Alexa rank it shows a rank that is exactly the same as my site’s rank. This could just be a coincidence but it would be rather strange if this were true.
I have had a quick look around on your site and I like what I see. I have subscribed to your feed and will be back. Keep up the good work.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:24 am
[...] [...]
May 19th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Hi Sailor, thanks for the feedback and comments.
Regarding the monitoring page, I see the same number as displayed in my Alexa toolbar (as it has not refreshed yet, it’s the same as the original number). If you could let me know what number you see it might help me to diagnose the issue.
If it’s not working correctly I’ll write something up to replace it.
Thanks again
June 8th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
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June 14th, 2008 at 9:40 am
There is some controversy over how representative Alexa’s user base is of typical Internet behavior. If http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?url=www.fortunehotels.in Alexa’s user base is a fair statistical sample of the internet user population, Alexa’s ranking should be quite accurate.
August 4th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
I cannot believe that turnaround, I’m looking on my toolbar and the site is now #341,166. Well done! I’ll be following your steps and I’ll let you know how it goes.
August 4th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Yeah, I do notice that the weekly figure has dropped, no doubt this is primarily due to regular visitors not coming back as I have been slow with the updates due to work commitments. I keep starting to write articles and just not getting the time to complete and publish them.
Hopefully the current projects will be coming to a close soon and I can provide some more quality posts.
Have a good one!
August 20th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Yeah while i’m newbie in these traffic gizmo, i try spend few hours to wondering how could i drove traffic to my locala Bahasa and English post in my blog.
I just installed the gizmo fro traffic monitoring such as Alexa and it’s script on my blog, but hey it’s still new and i’m aware it takes time for me to get more visitor to come. Hope guides mention above could help me.