So I know there are a lot of bloggers out there who believe alexa ranking is going to help them convince advertisers and that they can "game" alexa and make their ranking artificially higher. I've done the research so you don't have to. Alexa bases it's statistics on the amount of people who use the alexa toolbar or alexa sparky. This causes inaccuracy problems and also ways in which you can trick the alexa ranking. Let's say you have site A... You work hard, you install alexa toolbar on your browser and at work, and as usual, you are working on your site, and hoping your alexa ranking goes up. As a result you go from ranking 784,000 to 89,000. Usually this is a very optimistic situation. So what? ?? As soon as you stop surfing your site with your own browser, the alexa ranking goes back up to 500,000+. Even if you decide to go on vacation for a month---immediately, your ranking may go up. Makes you look even worse. You can only temporarily game alexa, but this is such a band-aid solution--you need surgery, you need to improve your site instead. I saw a blog just today, had ranking 15,000... Yet the blogger hasn't made a post since February 2009!!! That's almost 2 years!!! My estimation of their unique visitors per day is maybe 100-300. Regardless, I think you should first make your site interesting instead of relying on alexa.
the toolbar takes account of IP addresses too. You'd need rather more than 2 to get into the top 100k. it does tend to skew in favor of webmaster sites, and affiliate marketers (because these are the sort of people who install the toolbar). btw, if you install google's toolbar, they know EVERYTHING you do. Every site you visit, how long you spent there, how you forgot to deinstall it before trying to create a new gmail account...
Thats exactly why I never ever install any IE toolbars or FF addons on my personal machine, you cant be too careful, after all, if you are not paranoid it doesnt mean that nobody watching you
I've had great success with alexa on sites like the one in my signature, but it's not because I tried to cheat it or anything. It's because the articles were great and the writers were good writers. Thus, you can see it's alexa rank bounce up a lot. The only thing is, since it records 3-month, the recent success in the past month hasn't been affecting the 3-month ranking. Still, it's a lot of progress. I don't recommend trying to cheat through it.
The possible bet to increase your Alexa traffic is to have good contents and high traffic, nonetheless it is not wise to game Alexa because you will gain little increase on Alexa and fall down instantly if there is no activity in your site.