Why Alexa Ranking Matters and How to Increase Alexa Rankings
I’m a sucker for the Alexa rankings. Ever since the beginning of time when I created my very first website, I’ve always wanted to keep increasing my Alexa rankings.
What is the Alexa rankings? Alexa.com is a ranking tool owned by AMAZON. So it’s a legit and reputable tool in the eyes of many webmasters. The purpose of Alexa is to track and give a popularity ranking # to all of the websites in the world. As of today (3-24-2014), the top 3 rankings are: #1 Google, #2 Facebook, and #3 youtube. You can see more here
So the lower the Alexa rankings the more popular your website is. Brand new sites are usually rank in the 10-20 millionth place.
Alexa is in a way like a global website competition where every webmaster competes for a position in the top 10,000 site rankings.
The majority of us webmasters will never be able to own a site that will get below the alexa rankings of 1000. These are where the multi-billion dollar corporations (google, adobe, amazon, microsoft) and many of the big news sites dominate at.
Alexa ranking is indeed quite useful to me. It motivates me to improve my website and to gain more traffic. More traffic equals more money and value to my site.
Who else looks at your Alexa rankings?
Many ad networks like BuySellAds , CPM networks, and other premium ad networks will judge your websites based on your alexa rankings for approval into their networks.
On top of that, when you buy or sell a website, having a good Alexa ranking is also a good indicator of a good website.
Okay, so here’s my simple little Alexa experiment.
I won’t be doing any blackhat here like sending fake traffic to my site to inflate my alexa rankings.
This experiment is rather simple. Many webmasters claim that placing an Alexa widget on your websites will greatly improve your Alexa rankings.
As of today, March 24, 2014, I’ve just placed an Alexa widget on this site located at the bottom right-hand side.
It looks like this:
It shows my site’s current global Alexa ranking (123,332) and date.
This is the first time I’m actually using this widget, so we’ll see how it goes in a couple of weeks.
*Other things you can do to increase your Alexa ranking. Install the alexa ranking toolbar or widget for your browser. And every time you visit your website, it’ll tell Alexa that your website is getting hits which will then increase your Alexa rankings.
* And lastly, of course keep creating content for your website and increasing search engine traffic. More traffic = better Alexa rankings.
UPDATE MAY 13, 2014
The Alexa widget did absolutely nothing to increase my alexa rankings. I’ve added the alexa widget to my other sites with 5 times more traffic than HowToWebmaster.com. Yet HowToWebmaster is currently at 72k alexa ranking, and my other site with 5 times more traffic is currently around 450k alexa ranking and it hadn’t changed for months since installing the widget.
The only reason why HowToWebmaster is ranked higher, is because more people with the alexa toolbar visits this site. Since this is a webmaster blog, a lot of webmasters have the alexa toolbar; possibly coupled with the pagerank checker and other webmastery things installed, when coming to this site.
Thanks for reading!
I am greatly interested to follow up on how this pans out. All I can say is that my research regarding Alexa has yielded mixed results, to put it courteously. It seems that for anything above 500,000 the data are quite shoddy although Alexa is never shy of an exact figure. Not only that Alexa can be manipulated by driving traffic. That’s quite obvious. But it also seems to have a huge bias towards companies who themselves are engaged in SEO or Internet marketing activities. If you’re in that industry, the data seem to make more sense than, for example, if you were selling to the hair dresser industry and were a household name there so you’d not be doing SEO for the pure sake of doing it ad would have little to do with social media and traffic enhancement strategies and such.
I know there are sites that use bot traffic to inflate their ranking – which is why when look at a site’s Alexa ranking you’ve almost have to take it with a grain of salt. That’s just my two cents. Nice reading your articles Leon – keep em’ coming.
Corrisa
Moving to WordPress 3.9.1 and with good unique written content has greatly reduced my Alexa ranking. Past 24 hours added Alexa toolbar and will see the result. My website is education related, not seo. I do have a free directory and the entire site is do follow, an experiment to see how low of an Alexa rating I can achieve in the coming months. Just one directory listing since adding the directory, maybe Alexa too high, need to wait. High number Alexa rank = less visitor engagement, hopefully a lower rank number will keep tech visitors happy.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Let me know how it goes.