Alexa Traffic Rank Heats Up

Alexa as defined on their website is a "Web Information Company". This company is a rising contender in the ever popular toolbar competition to get you to use a browser toolbar. Alexa is the web information company that powers the Alexa traffic rating system that we will explain in detail here. It also boosts some useful tools you probably didn't even know about. I believe part of using a browser toolbar is getting the most use out of it possible. Period. Getting information out of a browser toolbar may not be as simple as it may seem though. Bars, graphs, numbers, more numbers, links, and search boxes. Whats up with just telling it to me straight?! Fortunately if you are reading this article you will have a better understanding of Alexa by the time you finish. Ok lets get started.

Alexa seems hard for people to understand at first. For example: I caught a guy on eBay trying to sell a website that claimed to get 2,000,000 hits a month. He read the Alexa rating wrong. Or a company claiming to be in top 10,000 websites on the web compared to its competitors by showing you its low Alexa rank. This company didn't realize some of its competitors had the same rank as well. You'll understand in a minute. One way to use Alexa ratings is to access traffic levels. You cannot determine how much traffic a site is getting just by looking at it. Its a website, and many like to hide how many visitors they may get for whatever reason. So wouldn't it be handy if a company came up with a way to show you how much traffic a website gets? Well, Alexa did it and now you can see the traffic a website is getting using Alexa.

First off, people need to understand that Alexa's numercial ranking system is DEPENDENT on the number of Alexa toolbars users that visit your website. This should be an underlying understanding each time you view a website to gauge its traffic levels. If you ignore this, then your impression of a website can be incorrect. This is a very common mistake that people make, and ultimately find out the error in their judgement. Get the facts before you make a decision based on Alexa. Let Alexa guide you to the correct information, and consider its rankings an estimation of traffic levels a website may recieve in any given time period.

Alexa is really easy to understand once you get the hang of it. Understanding how to read the rankings will be worth your time. For the duration of this article, consider your website or one you are familiar with. This will help apply what you learned here to something you can actually see and control. Every website whether or not its wants an Alexa rating, will get one. So forget about writing the Alexa company requesting to be removed. The Alexa rating can only help you.

How Alexa ranks your website:

Ratings are based on a level from 1 to 4,000,000 and it goes beyond 4 mil sometimes. The LOWER your rating on Alexa the better. Meaning if you have a ranking under 100,000 then your website should be producing some good traffic. 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 ratings are for new sites mostly, or sites with no traffic basically. While a rating of 1 will be the website with the most traffic. Use your Alexa toolbar to check on Yahoo's website for verification. Keep this in mind as well, you have to give it 3 months to give you an accurate rating.

For example, if you have a rating of say 300,000, which is not too shabby, you are getting about 14x the amount of traffic a 4,000,000 site gets. But this could not be accurate because you have not given Alexa enough time to rank your website properly. A system can be developed to tell me what a sites traffic level is from its rating, this should allow you to surf the web and get a good estimation of how many visitors a website gets a day. Do a little research comparing Alexa ratings with actual website traffic statistics to gauge a system for yourself.

The flaw in Alexa is that it determines traffic blindly. This means that you can elevate your level by increasing traffic to your sites. Meaning that if you claim your site is getting 10,000 hits a day and if you are great, but that doesn't determine what it will get after you stop advertising. It’s an over time thing. The rating will eventually go back up [which is lower traffic levels again] once the traffic tapers off but its takes several weeks.

Best thing to do is look at your site traffic stats and then look at your Alexa rating. Then watch the rating a couple of times a week to see if any changes have occurred. I lost 600,000 in rating points in one week from new search engine traffic. So the longer your site has been monitored by Alexa the better, it gives more of an accurate level of reporting. I also use Alexa to watch my rating over a month period. What my advertising has done for my site, etc... I am sure you can think of the possibilities.

Alexa also monitors the Average Pages Viewed by one visitor over a day, week, or month. The more pages viewed the more interested you visitors might be about the information on your site. If you get 1.0 as your Average Pages Viewed score, then one person only looks at one page on average at different time periods. Get a score of 7, most of the time it means 7 pages viewed per visitor.

Alexa also accesses reach per million of users. This rating is tricky to understand as well, took me a bit to put it all into explainable numbers not just rating points. Yahoo has a reach per million internet users of 28% which means for every 1,000,000 million visitors, they get 280,000 of that traffic. So if you have a traffic level of 20 then that means for every million people 20 visit your site.

Now, onto how to REALLY use the power of the Alexa ranking system:

The power in the Alexa ranking is your ability to tell if someone is telling the truth about their traffic levels, whether its good to purchase advertising space on a website and you want to see if they are really getting the unique hits they say they are. Check domains you could buy with traffic, show you where traffic is going on the web, show you which of your websites is more popular. How about determining what method your competitors are using to advertise their websites? Hmmm...is it search engine traffic or is it email marketing campaigns? Is it short-term targeted hit traffic or is it pop-unders over a longer period of time?

Here is how. Next time you come upon a website, and you want to know more. Click on the "Info" button to the left of the Alexa rating. What this will do is take you to the page telling you information about the website you are at. It shows you the traffic rank, snapshot of the website, various links, and possibly a review by an editor. Look over to the LEFT of the screen. Click the "Traffic Detail" link. This will take you the page with detailed traffic information. Most of the stuff explained above will be on this page. Ok here is what you are looking for in the first graph with about 3-6 months of traffic detail. Do you see any sudden fluctuations in traffic? Any large mountains on those horizons? Ignore changes that are 10,000 to 30,000 in difference. This is too much of a gray area to determine much. What you are looking for is LARGE fluctuations in traffic, dips and increases. A massive change from say 100,000 to 1,300 means this website has increased its traffic by almost 90,000 points!! Now what would do that? Email marketing campaigns, direct hits, pay-per-click campaigns, short term banners on high traffic sites, etc... Imagine all those new unique hits visiting a website using the Alexa toolbar. Its going to raise the Alexa rating by a lot. But what type of marketing would mean long lasting hills and smaller spikes in the graph. Most likely constant marketing strategies such as organic search engine traffic, repeat visitors, forums, longer PPC campaigns, and the possibilities go on.

I encourage everyone that is reading this article to put Alexa to work for you. Information for the right reasons is no longer as free as it once was. Using a free tool like Alexa will help you not only have some understanding about your website and others but understand the impact of your overall marketing strategy in the long run. So use it, read it, but don't misunderstand it.

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Free Alexa up ranking

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.

2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day. According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.
Like :



3. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers. Be sure to link to Alexa’s full explanation of their toolbar and tracking system so your readers know what installing the toolbar or extension entails.

4. Work in an Office or own a company? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers. Perhaps it will be useful to note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPs are used.

5. Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.

6. Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.

7. Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters usually have the toolbar installed. You’ll get webmasters to visit your website and offer useful feedback. It’s also a good way to give back to the community if you have useful articles to share with others.

8. Write content that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.
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9. Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://tinyurl.com/mysecretmovie . Replace http://tinyurl.com/mysecretmovie with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help. There is no official proof that redirects positively benefit your Alexa Rank, so use with caution.

10. Post in Asian social networking websites or forums. Some webmasters have suggested that East Asian web users are big Alexa toolbar fans, judging by the presence of several Asia-based websites in the Alexa Top 500. I suggest trying this only if you have the time or capacity to do so.

11. Create a webmaster tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often revisit your website to gain access to the tools. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very good example.

12. Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop link worthy material.

13. Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic. Doubly useful when your ad is highly relevant to webmasters.

14. Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while helping you rank in the search engines.

15. Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget/graph at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.

16. Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster forums and websites. A prominent and well displayed ad will drive lots of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your rank.

17. Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or promote specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis. You can easily find posters for hire in Digital Point and other webmaster forums.

18. Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers. This might be difficult to arrange and isn’t really a viable solution for most. I’m keeping this one in because some have suggested that it does work.

19. Use MySpace . This is a little shady so I don’t recommended it unless you’re really interested in artificially inflating your Alexa Rank. Use visually attractive pictures or banners and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. This will be most effective if your website has content that is actually relevant to the MySpace Crowd.

20. Try Alexa auto-surfs. Do they work? Maybe for brand new sites. I think they are mostly suitable for new websites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so I suggest using with caution.

Best Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank

Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com and is a website which provides information on traffic levels for websites. The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

In this article, I’ll examine the importance of the Alexa Rank as it relates to site monetization while briefly discussing some of the weaknesses involved in using Alexa ranking as a reliable traffic measure for any website.

Lastly, I’ve also included an extensive list of twenty methods and strategies you can use to increase your Alexa Rank dramatically in the short and long run.

What is the Alexa Rank?

Put simply, the Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases its ranking schema on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who visit a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

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)

Problems with the Alexa Rank

Alexa ranking is heavily skewed towards websites which have a large webmaster/tech audience. This is because webmasters or web savvy audiences are much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed than websites whose visitors are unaware of Alexa.

As such, many have indicated that Alexa is a vastly inaccurate method of measuring a website’s reach, traffic and potential. I don’t disagree.

Alexa is a silly way to measure web traffic but unfortunately, in an imperfect world Alexa is still heavily used by webmasters and ad networks when measuring the value of advertising on your website.

I understand the defects of Alexa’s ranking system and I’m not going to go into more detail about it here. What’s primarily important to me is that the Alexa Rank has become a central element in site monetization strategies.

I’m not concerned with the utility and value of Alexa but it’s perceived importance in the eyes of potential advertisers.

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