If you have a website for your business, you should be keeping an eye on your Alexa ranking. For those of you who do not know what an Alexa ranking is, don't worry, you're not alone. Alexa is a Web-based company that analyzes Internet traffic and ranks every site on the Web. You can simply go to www.Alexa.com and search your company website to see where you rank. If you haven't invested much time or money into search optimization, you will probably find your site somewhere between 1,000,000 to 2,000,000th on their list - or worse yet, not even listed. So, what is the purpose of the Alexa rank? Everybody from webmasters, advertising buyers, and advertising networks use this number as a guide to see how much a link is worth on your site. Some people look at the Alexa rank as adding credibility to a company's site. The good news is that with any moderate advertising or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign you should be able to influence your Alexa rank and start seeing immediate results. It's important to note, however, that as you get closer to the lower rankings (1-200,000), there is stronger competition from bigger websites like Google, YouTube and MySpace. Don't worry though, you won't be competing with them anytime soon. However, you should be looking to gain some footing and compete with your industry peers. So, what is the Alexa ranking actually based on? It all comes down to traffic. Increase your traffic, improve your Alexa score. It is that simple and there are many ways to achieve it. However, to kickstart Operation Boost Alexa Ranking--and make sure that Alexa's data on your website is as accurate as possible--be sure to use the following three items in addition to a well-designed and executed SEO campaign. 1. Install the Alexa toolbar http://www.alexa.com/site/download/ By installing the toolbar on your site, Alexa is able to analyze your browsing habits and count the number of times you view your own website towards the overall rank. Consider it a valid excuse to spend countless hours clicking on your site--or just hire the neighbor kid. 2. Place an Alexa widget on your site http://www.alexa.com/site/site_stats/signup Each widget records views on your website even if the person viewing it does not have an Alexa toolbar installed on their computer. One of the widgets is designed to record the % of global internet users who visit the site. Any of the widgets are easy to install. Here are a couple example Alexa widgets:
I've never heard of the alexa widgets to put on your site. I had the toolbar installed but got deleted when my computer crash, so I'll go reinstall that Thanks for the tips (and the reminder )
The Alexa data can be so easily manipulated, proxies, website clicker/fake viewer and bam your alexa ranking will go up. Not to bad for letting a program run day in and day out while you do other things...In my opinion alexa is junk.
Alexa ranking is just an approximation of traffic to websites and cannot be completely relied on. Moreover there are more ways of finding website traffic. On top of this, alexa rank can be easily fudged.
Thanks for sharing. I did not aware about this tips. I mean i have some belief that we can not do anything with Alexa ranking.
Alexa is own by Amazon. Alexa is indeed not accurate since it only counts unique daily traffic generated from browser using their own Alexa Bar. Your visitors don't have the Alexa bar? Then alexa will not be able to count the traffic to your site from those visitors!!! Then how reliable should this be considered? I don't think it's a good indicator, at most it proves that if you have a good ranking in alexa, then your site is accessed a lot, but the contrary is not true, most of all if you have a foreign language site, where alexa toolbar is less spread. A site with a low alexa ranking with 6.000.000 could might well be a very high accessed site!!! You still wanna raise your alexa ranking? easy and without any trick: install the alexa bar on your browser and access your site every day once. You will easily rank < 1.000.000. Alexa is not worth the concern...
Thanks for the info... this was what I was thinking about Alexa; guess I don't need to bother with it.
If your company have 20 computers, you should install Alexa toolbar on all of them and set your site to be homepage of those PC. I think your Alexa rank will quickly lower, especially for new websites.
Sorry, but Alexa rankings and Alexa website is completely BS!!! Do you really believe that advertisers or media agencies buy ad on sites based on Alexa rankings.....???? WHAT???
Don't know if this is still the case... A few years ago, we used an image on a group of websites... the image was called from one of our least popular websites... The least popular website was seen by Alexa as our most popular website, which at the time I put down the the image being accessed on all our popular websites - each time counting as a visitor by Alexa. Since then, I haven't put any faith in the Alexa number.
The Alexa ranking is definitley not something you should follow like a Bible, but it will give you a general idea of how much effort and work the webmasters are putting into their website or company. Generally the websites that I see in the 5+ millions always would fall under the "garbage" category. The Alexa ranking isn't the only thing to focus on, but there are people out there that still stick to the Alexa ranking as if it was gold. You want to please anyone who might be looking into working with you, and if the alexa ranking factors into their decision, if you have done the work you will be much better off! I also recommend Compete's ranking system as well. It gives you another place to compare, and it also gives you the people count for the month also
Thanks for insight. I was under the impression that you shouldn't think too much into Alexa ratings. Those ratings are not that critical to your success.