While Alexa traffic rankings are not a perfect way of determining a web sites traffic they are still useful for comparing your site to a site to which you do not have access to the logs. Additionally services such as Text Link Ads, for example, determine the price of ads on your site using your Alexa rank. The higher your Alexa rank (the highest rank being 1), the more money you can make from the ads and it’s not just Text Link Ads that this applies to.
In short having a good Alexa ranking matters. So how do you go about ensuring a good ranking?
Install The Alexa Toolbar
If you install the Alexa toolbar on your own web browser, then every time you view your own site, you register as a hit with Alexa. If you are an Internet Explorer user you can download it here, Firefox users can install the SearchStatus Extension instead. If you are not using Firefox then you should for a better browsing experience.
Encourage Others To Use The Alexa toolbar
This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers, put a link the toolbars on your site.
Put An Alexa Rank Widget On Your Website
Alternately you can use the Alexa widgets which should enable Alexa to track even visitors without the toolbar installed. You can find out about the Alexa Widgets here. They look like this:
Use Alexa Redirects
Use Alexa Redirects on your website URL. For example: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.businessopportunitiesandideas.com. Replace businessopportunitiesandideas.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will only count each unique IP address once a day.
There are a number of other ideas suggested on the sites listed below, but many of them are related to driving traffic, which will certainly help your Alexa rank, but I’ve not listed them in this article as they are not Alexa specific tips. Although ultimately driving traffic to your site is what will give you the highest ranking, once Alexa is counting the visitors.
Useful References:
- Use Your Alexa Rank to Make Money
- 20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank
- Increasing Alexa Rank – A Joint Experiment
This post is part of my Internet business opportunities series.
This blog is about business opportunities and ideas that I spot, think of or hear about and think are useful and interesting. It is intended to provide ideas and inspriation for you to help you find the right business idea for you to then grow it into a successful business.
God, no. Don’t use redirects. That’s like putting nofollow on all your backlinks (almost). I realy can not recomend that at all. However, if you were to open an iframe with the source as a alexa redirected page on your site (low content mayby html and a graphic) then you are effectivly telling alexa when people visit. Check my alex reach over the last few weeks for proof if this is a good method.
Great site you have there Matt. I have to admit I don’t use the redirects myself and would only suggest using them in forum signatures etc where they are going to be nofollowed anyway.
Matt is spot on regarding the Alexa redirect. Although I mentioned it in my article, it’s not something I’ve ever considered implementing.
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My site seems to have dropped off Alexa. It was slowly starting to increase and now it just shows zero.
Alexa isn’t a great measure of site traffic as they only count visits from people using their toolbar (which is far from everyone) and the type of user they have tends to be skew the results.
That said if you’ve got enough traffic it’s an interesting indication of how you compare to other sites but unless you make money from ReviewMe or Text Link Ads or the like it has no value other than curiosity.