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. 

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.

What Is Alexa Rank?

Recently Kang Rohman often gets e-mails which ask me about Alexa Rank or what is Alexa Ranking? Well, after thinking the questions, it seems interesting to talk about it in this blog. Besides increasing my vocabulary of keywords for uncle Google, this topic is also good for killing my boredom after playing with script or template codes almost everyday.

In order to fulfill the curiosity of the readers who have asked about Alexa Rank, below is some writing of Kang Rohman that deal with Alexa Rank.

What is Alexa Rank?

To define what Alexa rank is, Kang Rohman quotes directly from alexa.com and here is its original quote;

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, 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 a value derived from 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). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site's current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.

Because the definition is directly from Alexa.com, so it is very accurate and trustable.

How does Alexa.com know the number of traffics or visits in our blog?

As the definition above, the information of visitors or traffics number in our blog is taken from alexa toolbarwhich has been installed in internet users. If the alexa toolbar is installed in the browser we use, then, alexa.com will identify how many visitors and page view in our website or blog. After the data is collected, then the alexa machine will automatically make ranking in that website or blog.

Alexa rank starts from 1 and the best ranking is of, course one (1), the same as the ranking in school. The boy with ranking one is the most diligent student in the class. The smaller alexa rank a website or blog has, the better alexa ranking a website or blog gets or it means that ranking quality of the website or blog gets better. It is extremely opposite with Google Page Rank, if the page rank is high, it means the website or blog is good and has a lot of traffics or visitors. The bigger, the better.

How important is Alexa rank for a website or blog?

For those or blog owners who do not make their web or blog to look for money in the internet, Alexa rank is not important and useful. However, having a web or blog with good alexa rank could be a prestige for the owner because it shows that their web or blog is very popular. Am I right? Well. It depends on us.

For those or web or blog owners who become their web or blog to look for money, alexa rank is very important. Why is it very important? Because money giver websites, such as; Texts Link ads, Sponsored Review, ReviewMe, ask2link and others become alexa rank as the standard. Better alexa rank your web or blog has, more advertisers want to advertise in your web or blog. It means that $$$ will come to your wallet easily.

How can we increase the alexa rank?

Because alexa rank is very important for you who is looking for some money online, so you must make the alexa rank in your blog or web better and better. There are many ways to increase the alexa rank, but it seems that I will post about increasing the alexa rank in the next posting.

One of the most effective ways is by putting alexa widget in your blog or web, as Kang Rohman does in my present blog. For you who want to add alexa widget, just visit this website! You only type the URL address of your web or blog and then pick up the scripts and add into your web or blog.

Still confused about adding alexa widget, just wait for my next posting about alexa. Well, readers I think that’s the entire topic about alexa and for more details, just wait for my next posting...ok!!

-Jimvestin
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