If you are not familiar with Alexa, it is considered to be one of the premier web traffic data services out there. It is owned by Amazon.com and uses its free browser toolbar to help estimate the number of visitors that each site on the web is receiving. As you can imagine, the traffic estimates and rankings are not always reliable, especially for websites that are newer or do not receive more than 1,000 unique viewers per day.
So, how does Alexa come up with their traffic numbers and rankings? According to Alexa, “The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time.”
Sounds complicated, huh? My biggest complaint with Alexa has always been that its toolbar is not nearly as widely used as Google’s or Yahoo’s. Also, there are certain types of users that are more likely than others to use Alexa’s toolbar. This results in a poor representation of the overall web traffic profile. While most people seem to be focusing on PageRank to determine the value of a webpage or site, having a good Alexa ranking (lower is better) can really add value to those interested in buying advertising on your site or using your site to promote their products.
While it isn’t clear how easily a site’s Alexa ranking can be manipulated, it is widely believed that a ranking can be increased substantially with the use of a few quick techniques. Once your site breaks into the top 100,000 or so sites in Alexa’s rankings, any manipulation or boosts are much more difficult. Here are a few easy actions that you can take to try and boost your website’s Alexa ranking.
- Install the Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer or the SearchStatus Extension for FireFox. For reasons that I still don’t understand, Alexa has not yet made its toolbar compatible with Windows Vista, so if you are running Vista, SearchStatus is your only option. The idea behind this trick is that you will visit your website quite often and this will help increase the reported number of visits to Alexa. Also try to get your friends or employees to install the toolbar on their computers.
- Install the Alexa Widget on your website or blog. You can find the different widgets on Alexa’s website. The widget will load each time someone visits your page, so Alexa will know about it. It isn’t clear if this data is used for ranking purposes, but I have noticed improved rankings for my sites since adding a widget.
- Social marketing websites like Stumble and Digg can also be very helpful for giving your site a traffic boost. Even a short-term boost in traffic can really help with your ranking.
- Advertise your site and post your link on Webmaster Forums and East Asian websites. These are two groups that are believed to be strong users of the Alexa toolbar and will provide more targeted traffic to help increase your ranking.
- A less ethical method (meaning use at your own risk), is to buy cheap traffic from the many traffic brokers out there. I’ve found this traffic to be very poor quality in terms of getting clicks and making sales, but it is a very inexpensive way to dramatically increase the number of visitors to your site.
