How to Increase your Alexa Rank

In the world of blogging and general internet marketing, a lot of people check out other websites stats/traffic by using alexa.com. In fact you are provided server pieces of useful information, such as bounce rate, time on site, % of internet traffic coming to your website, downstream sites, upstream site, % of traffic as search engine referrals and much more.

Alexa in owned by Amazon.com and provides general internet website statistics about any particular website. The most common metric people look at is a websites Alexa Rank, which rates how popular your website is compared to the rest of the world, eg 500,000-th most popular website. Having an Alexa rank of 1 means you are the most popular website in the world according to Alexa – which Google currently has, Facebook being number 2.

Generally your Alexa rank correlates to the amount of traffic you are getting.

Also from an advertising/ marketing perspective prospects may check out your Alexa Rank before purchasing advertising on your site. As they won’t have access to your own statistics program (eg Google Analytics or AWstats), using Alexa gives you a general overview of the sites popularity.

So the question is, how to increase your Alexa Rank? You want to look as good as possible for potential advertisers, and having a strong Alexa rank can help.

Here is our list of tips that can help you increase your Alexa Rank (or lower it, actually the lower your rank number the more popular you are).

1. Install the Alexa Toolbar – www.alexa.com/toolbar

2. Install the Alexa Site Owners widget on your site/blog – www.alexa.com/siteowners/widgets

3. Claim your site on Alexa – www.alexa.com/siteowners/claim – this will enable you to edit certain information about your Alexa listing and also upload you contact details. Good for potential marketing/ advertising promotion.

4. Write Articles about Alexa – many people who use Alexa are marketing/ webmasters/ advertising people and as such they use the Alexa toolbar. If you get them coming to your site then their visitors stats get sent back to Alexa.

5. Consistently add new content to your site – this will encourage people to keep returning to your site and if they have the Alexa toolbar will keep your metrics ticking over.

6. Try to get social media interaction, getting your site Dugg (digg.com) or Stumbled (stumbleupon.com) can create a serious influx of traffic and boost your rank very quickly. Maintaining it from there can be a difficult task but definitely worth a shot.

7. Blog commenting on high traffic blogs with a link back to your own site is also a great way to get a high influx of visitors at no cost. If you pick say 5-10 high traffic blogs related to your niche and provide useful links back to your blog in the comments section, this can result in a nice increase in traffic.

8. If you blog in the Tech/ Social Media space, have a section of the site dedicated to webmaster discussion – if you can attract these people you will find a good percentage are using the Alexa Toolbar.

If you can think of any other tips – please let us know in the comments section below. Do you think you should even ‘try’ to increase your Alexa Rank?