Monday 16 May 2011

How To Improve Alexa Ranking Quickly

Author:

Fernando Hal Huang

Alexa Ranking is a site ranking assigned by Alexa Internet to measure websites\' popularity. It claims to use a number of factors in deciding the site popularity, but really it depends mainly on usage data collected by the Alexa toolbar.





The higher the ranking is, the smaller number is the rank given. Based on Alexa, Google (Alexa Ranking 1) is the most popular website in the Internet, followed by Yahoo(2), Facebook(3), and Youtube(4).





You can see website ranking in your browser after installing the toolbar or just check it at Alexa website.





How accurate is Alexa Ranking?


In a perfect world, Alexa user base would be a fair statistical sample of the Internet user population, and thus the ranking should be quite accurate in comparing popularity of one site to another.





However, in reality Alexa Ranking is hardly reliable. Alexa ranks sites based on tracking information of users of its Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer and from plugins in Firefox. Thus it is greatly dependent on the number of Alexa toolbar installed among the site visitors.





Websites targeted to webmasters and web designers generally do better in Alexa Ranking compared to websites in other niche, e.g. food or pregnancy. That is largely because webmasters are more willing to install the Alexa toolbar to check on the competitors\' Alexa ranking as well as to push up their own website ranking.





Internet users in some countries are also more willing to install the Alexa Toolbar compared to others. I have seen a Singapore website with 10k visitors a day ranked 60k in Alexa, while an Indonesian site with just 1k visitor a day ranked 30k in Alexa.





How To Get Higher Alexa Ranking Easily





Less than a week ago, the 7 day average of Cheatad.com Ranking was 165,534. Today when I checked again, the 7 day average has advanced to 93,963, with yesterday ranking was an even better 67,568.





At 67,568 it means that Cheatad ranks even better than my other website which has 40 times more visitors and 120 times more pageviews. That is absolutely amazing, or ridiculous, depending how you see it.





On the other hand, while that is a bit unexpected, there is really not much surprise here. Alexa Ranking is known to be unreliable, and skewed specially to websites with webmasters visitors.





The main factor of Alexa Ranking calculation is the number of visits by the Alexa toolbar users. Knowing that, it is quite easy to improve Alexa ranking for your website. As long as more of your visitors have Alexa toolbar, your Alexa ranking will shoot up.


Here is the five easy and simple ways to rank higher in Alexa:





1. Install Alexa Toolbar


Download and install Alexa Toolbar. If your browser is Firefox, you can either use the Sparky plugin (official Alexa toolbar for Firefox) or SearchStatus plugin. I personally use Search Status for the other nice functions like ability to highlight nofollow link, calculate keyword density, etc.





2. Encourage Others To Install Alexa Toolbar


This includes your blog readers as well as friends. The point is, it should be easier convert your current regular visitors to use the toolbar rather than getting new visitors that happen to have Alexa toolbar installed.





3. Write About Alexa Ranking


Posting an article about Alexa Ranking is a good way to attract more webmasters to your blog, most of whom have the toolbar installed.





4. Participate In Webmaster Forums


Again, most webmasters have Alexa toolbar installed. When allowed, make sure to include your blog URL in the forum Signature. Some interested webmasters might just click to visit your blog.





5. Reload Your Pages Incessantly


With your Alexa toolbar installed, read back all articles you have written, try different searches, and refresh pages over and over, to increase the pageview count. Even better, set your webpage to auto refresh every 15 seconds.





Well, try them and you will notice your Alexa Ranking shooting up. Of course, you need to make sure you actually have got good contents and good number of visitors too. Otherwise the Alexa rank that you have gained will be short-lived.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/how-to-improve-alexa-ranking-quickly-1894720.html

About the Author

Fernando Hal is the main contributor at CheatAd.com, a blog on SEO & Google Adsense. Subscribe to our RSS Feed for more tips.

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