Is Your Alexa Ranking A Concern To You?

While having recently changed my domain over and looking down to my toolbar to see an NA for Page Rank and Alexa I decided to start digging about on forums and other peoples pages.
And wow, there is a lot of information out there on Alexa, on how to increase your rating and how to do it in only 15 minutes! Or was it 5 days? 5 months? Either way I quickly learned there is a lot of information, most of it rendered useless as much of it is "old" and some touching on the grey area's and risky if you are concerned about your page rank or status on search engines. Thats not to say there isn't good information out there, you just have to search for it.

Back to the title of this article, is your Alexa Ranking a concern to you? well according to Alexa.com they define themselves as “the web information company,” and to many bloggers and webmasters they indeed are much more. For this group, Alexa should be a concern, after all Alexa helps leverage your blog or site's "selling worth" in the eyes of the all important marketers, promoters, advertisers, readers and anyone else who may be shopping for eyeballs. This includes the various publisher programs we tend to desire to do business with to monetize our webspace. So in that fact alone I suppose we should care, or at least take notice.

What Is Alexa?
Well Alexa is a company that measures traffic on almost every website out there in the cyberspace medium. And then offers this statistical information to marketers, advertisers and many others.

How Does Alex Gather Information?
This is where things get debateable and interesting. The basic answer is through a toolbar that is incorporated into your browser. Although there are also other ways as well. It is argued and rightfully so I believe, that this is an unfair measuring stick. The thought here is that most toolbar users are the more "technological savy" type. Not the average every day surfer who just may happen upon your website or blog. So those people (the average surfer)basically do not exist or register on the Alexa server as a visitor. One approach or work around is for you to install a widget on your website or blog to record these visitors, by forcing their browser to communicate with Alexa.com to gather your sites statistics. So in short, the only way to make sure your traffic is being accounted for , you need to install a widget. My widget for anyone wondering is centre of the page at the bottom in my sites footer. My stats as of this article? Zippo!, Notta, as my url is new and has not been crawled yet, to take into account for the new url.

What if my site does not cater to the technology savy type? Then I suppose you may have to get creative to find ways to bring those visitors? Perhaps an article or two that may interest them, or take part in forums that are known to have a lot of them with the hopes of some, following your posts/links to your site or checking out your site in your signature.

I thought you just said the widget will record all traffic? Well it is supposed to, but to make sure and be on the safe side, I would download the toolbar and also try to attract those others who are known to have the toolbar as well. It is not known whether or not the widget counts the same as the toolbar as far as stats. The toolbar at least works and that is known as fact.

Do I really care though? So some company says I dont have the traffic that I really do have.
Well that could very well be your stand on this and that is fine. But for the time being until some competing companies mature enough to rank and mean anything in the measuring game, Google's Page Rank and Alexa.com are the big hitters here and have a monopoly on this ranking business. And as I stated earlier, advertisers who pay publishers, also seem to care. Its not fair but at the end of the day it matters. Or at least if you wish to monetize your website.
Some programs for publishers use the Alexa.com scores your site receives to place a value on the space on your page and as a result, calculate what your "pay/worth" is going to be. The better your Alexa score the more money you possibly could pocket, making Alexa rank a must for those who wish to make money online.
And yes it is also widely known that these statistics can be gamed, manipulated and played with, but until the market changes, Alexa still means something. Fair or not.

What can I do to improve my ranking?
Now thats the question everyone is always asking. My old stats used to be less than stellar, and thats being kind, and I assume once I do get ranked again they will be nothing impressive either. But with some hard work I hope to rectify this.

As I mentioned, Download the toolbar.

Submit your site to the Alexa.com's crawler if you dont have a rank. need the address? Crawl Here

And install the widget supplied by Alexa.com on your site.

Finally write some popular content for your site. With that popular content, you can attract a larger visitor rate and help improve your score. After that, there is always the following list of things I've found on many various pages.
Do they work? most do but the results vary for each individual.

Other Possible Alexa .com Rank Tips:

1. Write amazing content and get it stumbled. This blogger has seen great success with Stumble.

2. Display Post Excerpts. That commonly found <--more--> line often found on a bloggers articles on their front page. Why? theory here is you then need to click on the "show more" line to goto the article's single page, which is yet another hit on that widget and or toolbar when that new page loads. Alexa's FAQ states,

A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview.

Want to read a blog that discusses this in more depth? Try, Increase Your Alexa Rank With Post Excerpts

3. Write useful, quality content, mostly webmaster-related. Promote this content 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 it is likely that they will have the Alexa toolbar installed.

4. Write blogs and articles about Alexa. Yes thats right, write about Alexa. The hope here is to have others write about Alexa and possibly link back to your page. (more traffic)

5. Submit your material to social bookmarking sites. Digg, Delicious and all those other types (Same thing as #1)

6. Tell your friends about Alexa and ask them to install the toolbar. Perhaps your family, parents, grandparents, if they visit your site/pages as well.

7. When you post on forums, especially those tech types or webmaster types, remember to include your site in your signature. Even if you dont talk about your site, your link is still there for possible visitors. I know I click on those often just out of curiosity.

8. I've never really thought about it, but I read on Dosh Dosh, that apparently Asian people are big on Alexa and the toolbar. Find out where they hang out in large quantity and post good material for whatever the site is about and you could be in for a lot of good quality visitors with the toolbar installed. In fact I would go take a look at that list there. Many other useful idea's as well.

I should note however that the redirect method has been fixed and no longer works.

As well autosurfs tend to come up as well on various sites and lists and as I read on another blog by GoogleLady that this can negatively impact on your Page Rank. Another good read on Alexa.

All I can say is, that whether or not you like it, Alexa should mean something if you are concerned about monetizing your website. A better rank there can only help but increase your financial gains or at least open the door to other monetizing avenues. Its the how to part that becomes dicey. Download the toolbar, put up that widget and write great content. From there on its all debateable as to what works and what doesn't.

Anyone who is doing something different and having great success, I would love to hear about it, as would others I am sure.