Empty Streets Special: Alexa Ranking

I have been doing everything in my power to keep my Alexa Ranking stats to move up for the past couple of months since the new year started. A friend has advised me that the best way to help my stats to move up is to actually write about the Alexa Ranking system. He advised this because of the following:

See Alexa’s definition of the Alexa Traffic Rank:

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)

If you noticed, the rank is very dependent on the Alexa Toolbar users and unfortunately even if your number of readers may not have decreased but if they dont have the toolbar with their system you wont get credited. The only people that would ever have the desire (even the know how) to install the Alexa Toolbar would be webmasters and internet cyber geeks. What they are mostly interested in are data such as the one am writing about now about the Alexa Toolbar. That is the reason why my advisor recommended writing about Alexa.

I have done extensive research in the past and am ready to talk about it today and I do hope that what ever data that you find here with me is useful for you, especially those that are venturing into the market of the virtual highway.

Let us start with the Pros and Cons:
Pros

• It helps advertisers and webmasters determine the real marketing potential of your site. Blogs and ordinary websites get ranked the same way
• Useful tool to compare against a competitor’s site to measure marketing efforts and popularity

• As opposed to Google's PageRank, the lower your ranking number, the better.


• It helps Webmasters and advertisers see the true marketing potential of your Web site. The better your Alexa rank, the higher they will be willing to bid to buy advertising space on your Web site.


• Personal pages or blogs are taken into consideration and ranked in the same manner as regular Web sites. They will even get a distinctive mark (*)


• Given that Alexa ranking offers you information about your Web site, it is a good tool to have in view of search engine optimization.

Cons

• Fairly small sample size of audience (those that have the Alexa toolbar installed) to measure marketing efforts
• Due to the small sample size, there are millions of websites that may get a lot of traffic but are not ranked by Alexa
• Subdomains are not ranked separately, and neither are subpages within a domain. The overall traffic is calculated for the top-level domain only.
• Many people feel that Alexa traffic can be “played” to therefore show inaccurate results.

Here are some of the best ways to quickly improve your Alexa Ranking:

• Download and install the Alexa toolbar and then surf your own site.


• Place the Alexa widget on your Web site. It will entice the visitors to check it out, and you know, each click counts.


• Write useful, quality content, mostly webmaster-related. Promote it on webmaster forums and on social networking sites. The idea is to get as many computer and Internet savvy people as possible to visit your site, since the probability that they will have the Alexa toolbar installed is high.


• Write posts on your blogs and articles about Alexa. You will get links to your pages that will help improve your ranking.


• Try to get your articles on such social networking websites as digg.com , del.icio.us , or www.stumbleupon.com


• Optimize your site for Alexa related keywords.


• Tell your friends about the Alexa toolbar, have them download and install it on their computers, and then tell them to visit your site.


• Use Alexa redirect. This means placing http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect? in front of your Web site's URL. Thus, Alexa will even take into consideration clicks on redirected links even if the visitor does not have the Alexa toolbar.


• Whenever you post on webmaster forums, include your site's URL in your signature. It is very likely that most webmasters have the toolbar installed, and there's a great probability that they'll visit your site.

Finally if you still feel that you need more help on the Alexa Ranking Toolbar here is a video tutorial that has helped me a lot in my own quest to increase this rather volatile statistic.

By the way since I noticed that most of my traffic comes from those that use Firefox 2 - 3 I would like your help to help us as it is only now that Alexa has finally noticed and made a toolbar that was once only exclusive for IE users. With this toolbar you will be able to see the traffic ranking based on alexa of every website and link that you visit to see its popularity in more ways than one. :)

Please download Alexa Toolbar for Firefox here