Alexa is a company that ranks websites based on the amount of (estimated) traffic it receives. The goal of most websites is to climb into the top 100,000 in the world. Whether you have created a blog as a long term project for yourself and your readers or as a project to flip for some quick cash, your Alexa ranking is very important.

Many people (especially marketers) have the Alexa toolbar installed to their browser. This enables them to quickly get a view of how popular a site is. In the case of marketers, it helps them to determine how well established and popular a competing website in their niche is. An Alexa ranking below 100K shows great strength and popularity naking your site more appealing to some.

When I first launched this site back in March, the first Alexa ranking I saw for it was just over 12,000,000. Through SEO and list building I brought that ranking to below 400K in September and it was rapidly dropping… Then I got busy with other projects and had some other issues that kept me away from posting here and the sites numbers dropped off to just over 500K and has been holding steady there for the past month or so… Without doing anything to increase the ranking except having the Alexa toolbar installed on my own computer.

When I start posting more to the site and getting it indexed more often, that number should increase dramatically. After all, I’m not building from 12M this time.

There are some steps to increase the Alexa ranking of any blog quickly, but first we need to understand how Alexa works.

Alexa uses an algorithm to determine how many visitors that your site receives. This is based on the total number of estimated internet users and the number of people who have the Alexa toolbar installed. This is not an exact science, but is a pretty fair way of estimating the number of visitors to your site, but it can be a skewed number.

Let’s say, for arguments sake, that 5% of all internet users have the Alexa toolbar installed but 10% of the visitors to your site have the toolbar. Using Alexa’s method of determining the number of visitors would give your site a false number of roughly double the actual visitors. By the same measure, if only one percent of your visitors had the toolbar installed, your Alexa numbers would be much lower than the actual amount of visitors.

Now that we have an idea of how Alexa works, let’s see how we can make it work in our favor. Below are some fast and easy ways to increase your blog’s Alexa ranking.

1.  This one should be obvious, but just in case… Install the Alexa toolbar to your browser. Every time you visit your blog, whether it be to post an article, moderate comments or whatever, your browser notifies the Alexa ranking engine of a visit to the site.

****Note – If you are the only one visiting the site and you do it numerous times per day, some of your visits will be discounted as the system does track where the visits are coming from based on IP address.

2.  Ask your friends and family to install the Alexa toolbar to their browser as well. When they visit your site, they will help your rankings, too.

3.  Set your browsers home-page to your blog and get your friends and family members to do the same. If you all have the Alexa toolbar installed (Tips one and two) then this will send a visit reference to the Alexa ranking engine each time you load your browser.

If you work in an office with many computers, try to get as many of them set to your blog as their homepage, too. if you were the head of an IT department for a major corporation this could really accelerate your numbers… It could also get you fired, so be sure to ask permission first.

4.  Increase traffic to your blog. Alexa ranks sites on how much traffic that they receive. The more visitors you have to your site, the more that will have the toolbar installed and the higher your ranking will go.

This is just basic SEO and promotion stuff here. Get more readers and your ranking will get better!
5.  Add the Alexa widget to your blog. Many people swear by this method as it supposedly tracks every visitor to your site.

**** Note – The Alexa widget reports stats differently to the ranking engine than the toolbar does, so if you are sending many people with the toolbar to your site to help your ranking, this may actually not help and could potentially hurt your ranking.

6.  Add a blog roll to your site and encourage other bloggers and webmasters to leave a link for you to add. Most webmasters have the toolbar installed and if they are visiting your site to leave their link, then their visit is being reported to Alexa.

7.  Create a post asking your readers to install the Alexa toolbar. If your blog is marketing related this benefits you both. You are gaining an added boost to your Alexa ranking and the have a toolbar that they can use to check out how well their competition is doing.

If you frame your post in a way that shows the advantages that they will receive by having the toolbar installed, then many more of them will be likely to download and install it.

What if, like me, you have numerous blogs… You cannot set everyone to the homepage. I try to visit all of my blog sites at least once a day. (I did this before I ever installed the Alexa toolbar, anyway, for site maintenance) While this is not going to dramatically increase their ranking, it does let Alexa know that the site is getting visitors, if none of your other visitors have the toolbar installed.

There you have it. A few quick and easy tips that anyone can do to increase their blog’s Alexa ranking.

BTW… Due to an unforeseen illness, the launch of the new Quick and Easy blogging for Profit site has been re-scheduled. The latest pre-launch video should be added later today or early tomorrow. Thanks for your understanding.

Related articles

• How To Increase Your Alexa Rank (crenk.com)
• Improve Your Alexa Ranking with the Official Alexa Chrome Extension (blazingminds.co.uk)
• Getting Higher in Alexa Ranking (kirapermunian.co.cc)
• Has The Alexa Chrome Extension Improved My Alexa Rank? (blazingminds.co.uk)