Alexa Ranking System

The Alexa ranking system is one of the new ranking systems of concern to anyone who is interested in improving traffic to their website. Alexa is owned by Amazon.com and ranks websites based on the amount of traffic to the website over the past three months. However, the rankings through Alexa are somewhat skewed because the information for a particular website is tracked through visitors who have the Alexa toolbar installed. This means there may be websites which get an exorbitant amount of traffic, but if they do not have a large number of visitors utilising the Alexa toolbar, their Alexa ranking will suffer.

Whether or not you decide to make a concerted effort to increase the Alexa ranking of your website is a personal decision you will have to make. Some website owners look at the popularity of Alexa with respect to Google and decide it is just not worth the effort. They figure they are getting enough traffic just by optimising for Google, so why invest the extra time and energy to increase their Alexa ranking as well. This is certainly understandable; however, it also should be noted a higher ranking on Alexa will certainly not detract from your success with Google or other search engines. It can only add more profit to your bottom line, so why not do what you can to increase your Alexa rank.

So just how do you increase an Alexa rank? If you are optimising for popular search engines, you are already headed down the right path because traffic plays the primary role in Alexa rankings. Make sure you are using the Alexa toolbar yourself. This is important because, as we mentioned previously, only visits from users who have the Alexa toolbar installed will be recorded. Next, add an Alexa rank widget to your website. You will get credit for a visit each time a user clicks on the widget and you may also be introducing some of your regular visitors to Alexa.

Tailor your content to entice those who are likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed to visit your website. The Alexa ranking is an important area of interest for many website owners, so many website owners will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Therefore, writing top quality content on subjects such as SEO, improving page rank and improving traffic, will likely bring visitors who have this toolbar installed. Likewise you can create a section of tools for website owners to bring this target audience to your website.

by: Sue Cooper