How to Boost Your Alexa Rankings

Your beautiful web page will be a waste of effort if it does not receive traffic.  There are a lot of ways to attract visitors to your web page, but today, we’ll take a look specifically at the Alexa traffic rank, which is the service that is relied on by most advertisers on determining the value of your web page.  As mentioned earlier, the major search engines are now showing the Alexa traffic rank in their search results.  Although it is unclear to me whether the traffic rank will impact a site’s placement in the top search results, web savvy people will see the rank and may make a decision to not visit sites that do not have a lot of activity.  A site with more “authority” will appear in the top search engine results and will have a lot of traffic.

Increase Rank by Adding An Alexa Traffic Rank Badge to Your Web Site.  Our Test.

There’s one suggestion that seems to be common on all “Alexa recommendations” that I’ve read, and that’s to add the Alexa badge to your blog or website.  Does it work?  I don’t know.  To test this theory out, I added the badge to this blog on November 30, 2008.  The data was apparently being updated because there was a conflict between the traffic rank reported on the badge and the traffic rank reported on the Alexa toolbar.  This is shown in the image:

In the above screen capture, I took a “picture” of the traffic badge appearing on this blog together with my toolbar, which is shown on the bottom of the image.  As you can see, the badge reported a rank of 323,214 and the tool bar reported a lower rank of 326,356.  This discrepancy lasted for about a day.  As of today, December 5, 2008, the discrepancy resolved itself and the rank is higher.

Even though today is the 5th, the badge displays a rank dated December 3, 2008 because that was the last date that Alexa updated its statistics.  As you can see, the traffic rank increased, jumping from 323,214 to 323,073.  Since only a couple of days have passed, I am not sure whether this test is conclusive at this point.

Increase Rank by Adding the Alexa Toolbar to Your Browser.

Another tip that many people recommend for increasing your Alexa traffic rank is that you should add the Alexa toolbar to your browser.  Once it is installed, be sure to visit your page that you want to increase your rank on every day.  Some people suggest that you make that page your homepage.

Get Backlinks from Heavily Trafficked Sites to Increase Your Alexa Page Rank.

To increase your Google Page Rank and traffic, common wisdom dictates that you get as many unique links from other sites pointing to your page as possible. In terms of Alexa, I believe it is important to get links from sites having an Alexa traffic rank of less than 500,000.  In yesterday’s post, we took a look at Alexa’s “sites linking in” feature and observed that all reported sites had a traffic rank of under 500,000.  Here are some sites in Alexa’s top 500,000 rank that will give you back links (if you have installed the toolbar, you will be able to see the Alexa traffic rank of these sites):

• This Blog - If you add non-spammy comments to this blog and include your URL in the comments, you should see a referral reported on Alexa.
• Blurb at the Blurbosphere - Some of the free blog services reported on the Blurbosphere (left hand column of the home page) have good traffic; others are on their way to higher page rank.  Getting back links at the blogs may increase your rank.
• Join Article Underground for high ranking page rank and/or high ranking traffic blog posting privileges.  Article Underground provides (a) 400 articles a month that you can rewrite for your web pages and (b) a wealth of powerful blogs provided by Article Underground and its members.

Read Dosh-Dosh’s Article on Alexa Traffic.

Rather than re-inventing the wheel by rehashing other people’s suggestions, take a look at one of the better compilation of Alexa tips, which is Dosh-Dosh’s article, 20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank.  As the author states, the ideas are all speculative.  Nonetheless, the article is well worth a read.

Get Lots of Back Links to Increase Your Traffic.

By obtaining one-way links from other pages, you will see that your pages with targeted keywords will start to show higher in the search engines.  You can do this through article marketing, directory submissions, social bookmarking and other means.

For Non-Technical People:  How to Implement the Alexa Tools Discussed in this Post.

Check out the December 3 post to find out where you can get the Alexa toolbar and other tools that will enable you to see Page Rank, Alexa’s Traffic Rank and other SEO details at a glance.  Visit Alexa and use the Webmaster Tools provided for numerous services, including a traffic widget/badge that you can install on your web page.  To get the badge, you need to first select the Widget option from the Webmaster Tools menu.

After you have selected the “widget” option, you will be provided with a menu of different displays.  If your site is not in the top 100 rankings, you might want to scroll down and select either the Alexa Site Stats Button or the Alexa Traffic Rank button.  In this case, we’ve selected the Traffic Rank button for display on this blog.  Type in your URL as shown.

You then receive a code specifically for your site.  Simply copy and paste it into your blog or website.