Hi Respected Dpers, I have a few blogs but alexa ranking is not that good. So I'd like to know the best way that can help my sites to reduce their alexa ranking asap. I don't want to invest $$$ paying for SEO service and all that. I just want to do it on my own and learn it for the future use too. can you please help to know how? I'd heartily appreciated all your suggestions. Thanks in advance!
Hopefully someone will explain it, let's wait for some good explanation Someone here will come to this thread soon or later...
If you want to improve your alexa ranking, Do the social bookmarking in effective way and share your submission across the globe. Thanks.
I heard you need to start with making sure you have an alexa toolbar on your own site. That, apparently, helps you get the ball rolling.
You basically have two ways to decrease Alexa ranking and both cost you something. One price is time, the other is money. If you don't want to spend money, it will cost you more time. If you don't want to take a long time, it will cost you money. There are some black hat ways to short circuit the system, but I don't recommend them because as soon as the SE's discover your tactics, the domain is sandboxed and it's almost impossible to ever get ranked again. If you're short on cash, put some good articles together and make sure they have a 1%-2% keyword density for the keyword phrase you're targeting. Get them submitted to the top article directories so they get picked up by the SE's. Write a good Press Release and submit it around the web. Do some social bookmarking at places like Digg, Stumbleupon and del.icio.us. After a few days, you'll start to notice some movement. Hope this helps a bit. Let me know if you have any questions.
First, forget Alexa. They don't matter. Really. Alexa's ranking system is entirely based on samples (people with the Alexa toolbar installed). They look at where Alexa members go and then extrapolate your overall rank. This, obviously, is completely biased, since statistically speaking we can be fairly sure that the people with Alexa's toolbar installed are not very indicative of the overall population of web users. The Alexa Toolbar is even considered malware by many, including Microsoft of all companies. There is a very good article that is quite fair (more fair than I'd be willing to be) at http://www.mark8t.com/2008/08/31/alexa-ranking-does-it-matter-to-increase-your-rank/ . There are plenty of better options for web statistics. But, if you are going to use Alexa as a basis, then you should really do the same thing you would do for basic SEO. I'm no SEO expert, I'm quite the novice in this specific area, but the basic stuff is straightforward enough. Get more people to your site. Get more links to your site from other sites. The better and more popular the sites linking to you, the better. Link to other major sites. Make sure you have the right keywords in your meta tags (although these are widely deprecated now) and make sure you are using standard, correct HTML code. Have a site map and the other conventional links ("about us", "contact", "privacy", etc). Getting links to you is a matter of getting people to want to link to you, IE have good content. BUT, you can obviously force the issue by taking matters into your own hands. Register with all the major search engines to have them crawl your site. Submit your site to free directories like DMOZ. If you have a blog, like you do, syndicate it. If you have a major blog, then go look up some of your competitors on Alexa and see how they rank compared to you and see how many sites they have linking in. Click on the number and see WHICH sites are linking to them. Try and get those sites to link to you as well. You can, as noted by others, opt to write articles on sites that link to your blog with appropriate keywords in them. You can try all manner of tricks to get extra links this way. You can publish a Google Docs document by sharing it publicly. You can use social media sites, social bookmarking sites, you can post a webpage publically of your own bookmarks. Just don't be too obvious or greedy or you will get marked (maybe not by Alexa, but by Google) as triyng to cheat the system and then good luck to you. That's about all I can tell you as of now, but I hope to learn more from these forums.
well Alexa Rank is one indicator that you have good blogs, so if you want to decrease you blog's alexa you should create a good blog. Alexa Rank is combination of unique visit, page reach, and page views, in other word is traffic. So what you should do are: 1. attract more visitor; 2.keep them stay long in your blog; 3. make your blog stay in #1 page in Serp's. That simple, isn't it?
Thanks for all your suggestions. !@Wholesaleguru, I just gone through the article you referred and it somewhat opened my eyes. I came to know quite a lot about alexa now. Thanks again!
Thanks for the clear explanation and pointer to a good article. Let me throw in one more piece of info. I learned that PR and advertising people pay a lot of heed to Alexa. I was told by a woman in the PR business that she checks certain websites --using Alexa--quite often. So it does matter in the sense that advertising people check it and might want to advertise on my blog if my Alexa rating is good.
This is true. It is also usually the exception, although I will grant you some specific cases in which this might be the rule. I would not go as far to say that one should completely IGNORE Alexa, but nor would I emphasize Alexa rank as a measure of results or success. Alexa REVIEWS are obviously of value to PR and advertising, because they reflect opinions that can lead others to or away from your site and also can be a way to pick up on buzz (positive and negative) around your website. If you have a ton of bad Alexa reviews, find out what people are complaining about and address these issues. If you have lots of good reviews, find out why and do more of that. Also, you make a good point that Alexa ranking and total links in DO deserve ample thought if they are bad, purely because some people use Alexa as a means of checking out sites. This goes for any site or source that rates or ranks your company or website, though. Just the way you would want to pay attention to a Facebook group called "I hate *yoursite*" I will further concede that it is true that some third party advertising agencies put a lot of stock in Alexa rankings and statistics. You have to be able to PROVE you are getting a certain amount of traffic, and your own server's log files will not be trustworthy enough to convince a company to pay you a certain amount of advertising money. Obviously you need a third party who is impartial to measure traffic, so that the ad company can be confident in the statistics. Alexa is still used by some companies simply because they are stubborn and unwilling to move to newer, better, analytic tools, or perhaps they have a preference for some specific reason. In any event, if you end up with an ad company who cares about your Alexa ranking, then by simple deduction you too must care about your Alexa ranking (assuming you're a smart business person, that is). Overall, pay attention to Alexa as a part of a wider, more comprehensive PR, advertising, SEO and web development strategy. Just don't focus too much on Alexa, unless you have reason to, and remember that it's not worth emphasizing Alexa over other, better systems of measuring and maintaining your website status. Alexa rank is far less important than Google Rank and search results in other major search engines, and its statistics are far less reliable than, say, Google Analytics. In fact, I would say the best source of information on your web audience is your own server's log files. But, again, you cannot use those as proof when dealing with advertisers and they wont give you any information on what people are saying about your site. To me, the most valuable thing about Alexa as a webmaster or from an SEO perspective seems to be the list of linking in sites, since you can look up your competitors and see where all their back-links are coming from and try to duplicate them on your own site (by getting listed in those directories or following similar SEO and advertising strategies). This, more than the ranking (which is unreliable), is truly valuable information that gives you leads on ways to improve your overall ranking everywhere and thus traffic (since all the big search engines seem to count back links with significant weight when determining your page rank and relevance). Google Rank trumps everything and anything else it seems, and should be your first concern and your primary (but not only) focus for SEO and driving traffic. There's a great article on improving your Google Rank here: buzzle.com/editorials/6-10-2005-71368.asp
The only thing I will add to this (as I think the topic has been covered quite well) is that while Alexa ranking may not really matter much per se it can be quite important if your major aim is to sell your domain once it is sufficiently well ranked. The problem is, most people who are looking to invest in a domain will check out the Alexa ranking and a bad ranking could well be a deal breaker. I am not trying to say that this is a good way to make such a decision... Alexa rank, like Google PageRank can be quite poor indicators of the quality of a site, but for those looking to buy a domain who do not have access to better metrics (provided through many SEO packages, programmes and websites) these metrics are usually relied on and can be a dealbreaker for folks. If your aim is to increase traffic and such, I wouldn't worry too much about Alexa and would focus more on your analytics. Hope this helps!
To get a better Alexa rank, you need to target users that actually have the Alexa toolbar installed. A lot of users from India tend to have the toolbar installed, so getting traffic from Indian users can be a good thing (not that Indian traffic is a bad thing).
Crockstar makes some good points as well. I think the overall rule of thumb here should be that you always have to consider you actual goals and what specific results you're looking for (as well as what your future plans and aims are). You need to focus your SEO strategy toward your overall web strategy and purpose. That means that there are plenty of instances in which your Alexa ranking might be a factor to seriously consider, but which measures matter the most completely depends upon your specific situation and goals (and what you're trying to measure). Google Page Rank or Analytics are not completely accurate representations of traffic, but they are even worse measures of overall quality of content. And so, in appraising your site and optimizing it to achieve your goals, you must keep the specific nature of those goals in mind and use tools to measure and improve your site based on what those goals are. This is basic BIG PICTURE kind of stuff, and the big picture often gets lost in the discussion of how to increase page rank and alexa rank and how to get more traffic and lower bounce rate, etc. The bottom line is you're doing all this for a REASON and these are all just either means to an end, or metrics for assessing how well you are meeting those ends currently and what you can do to better meet them in the future. Keep this advice in mind and you will be more likely to develop a holistic and comprehensive web strategy that will be more successful
How can we know how many user have installed alexa toobar? Is there any tool to know how many people have installed alexa tool?
You could use a script to detect if a user has the Alexa toolbar installed: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum39/837.htm