How to Improve Your Alexa Ranking?

Alexa is owned by Amazon.com and is a very useful indicator to show your relative ranking in terms of page views, reaches etc. You can use this ranking to compete and compare with your keen competitors. Below is a collection of methods you can use to boost your Alexa Rank. Most of the tips were gleaned from several fellow bloggers and webmasters who' ve experimented with Alexa.

Other tips come from specific articles and forums. Those that I have referenced are listed at the end of this post.

Do these tips work? Yes, they do. But most of them require active effort in generating traffic. They will work as long as long as you are consistently performing specific actions.

To increase your Alexa rank in the long term, I would suggest coming up with quality content which draws and maintains a large audience. This is an excellent way to passively increase your Alexa rank.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.



2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day.



3. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers.



4. Work in an Office? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers.



5. Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.



6. Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you or visit your blog, which helps with your traffic rank.



7. Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters usually have the toolbar installed. I like doing this for a few reasons. You’ll get webmasters to visit your website and get some feedback in return. It’s also a good way to give back to the community.



8. Write content that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.



9. Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.doshdosh.com . Replace doshdosh.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help.



10. Post in Asian social networking websites or forums. Some have suggested that Asian (Korean or Hong Kong) web users are big Alexa toolbar fans.



11. Create a webmaster tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often visit your website to use the tools. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very good example.



12. Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Of course, you’ll have to develop link worthy material.



13. Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic. Doubly useful when your ad is about webmaster/tech related products/content.



14. Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as a resource for webmasters while helping you rank in the search engines.



15. Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget at the bottom of the post, call for Alexa signups or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.



16. Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster forums and websites. A prominent and well displayed ad will drive lots of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your rank.



17. Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or get respected users to pimp specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis.



18. Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers.



19. Use MySpace . This is a little shady so I don’t recommended it unless you’re really interested in artificially inflating your Alexa Rank. Use visually attractive (wierd/sexy/funny) pictures or banners and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. You’ll get a lot of clicks but it doesn’t mean people are visiting your website.



20. Try Alexa auto-surfs. Do they work? Maybe for brand new sites. I think they are most suitable for new websites with a terrible Alexa rank. There might also be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense.