How to improve your Alexa traffic rank the best methods

Recently we were looking to purchase some websites from flippa.com and notice that one site had an alexa rank of 200,000 with only 250 uniques per month.

In the past we once held an alexa traffic rank of ~1,200,000.

We checked today and our alexa rank was 4,912,251 and yet we were on track to get almost 5,000 uniques this month ( november 2009 ) so just what the hell was going on and why had our alexa rank dropped like a stone?

Firstly lets look at an important question - does alexa traffic rank matter? Then we will look at what we have done to reverse the alexa traffic rank drop and update this article after a month with our new alexa ranking so we can measure any difference to what we have done.

If you are getting what you want from your website then its probably fair to say you should not give a stuff about your alexa rank. If you are after selling your website, links or advertisements on the site then alexa traffic rank counts for a lot and you should look to improve that rank - the lower the alexa traffic rank the better.

Looking at the uniques from the site we were looking to purchase and comparing our uniques the alexa rank didn't seem to tally. Alexa traffic rank gathers data ( unsure at what percentage )  from visits made by users with the alexa toolbar installed. So could this mean that just by installing the alexa toolbar on your own computer and visiting your own website make a difference? The truth of the matter is almost certainly yes. You own visits will be counted so the first step is to get yourself the alexa toolbar installed in your browser.

How do you get the alexa toolbar?

Visit the alexa website to obtain the toolbar for your web browser. Then set your homepage on your web browser to your own website.

Step 2.

Place the alexa widget on your website which may help to track users which dont have the alexa toolbar installed.

How do you get the alexa widget?

Again this can be obtained for free from the alexa website. Choose which widget you want on your website and type in your website url into the widget builder. The widget builder will produce some javascript which you will then need to copy and paste into your webpage source. This will take you around 2 minutes to do so its certainly worth doing. In addition it will allow you to check your alexa rank if you are away from home and using another computer without the alexa toolbar installed. All you need to do is to visit your own website and check the ranking shown on the alexa widget. Once you have installed the widget the alexa rank will be shown instantly.

Step 3.

Write a blog or article about what you have done? Does this work? Well it must - you are reading what I have to say right now. The idea is that webmasters and search engine optimisers will also be looking on how to improve their alexa rank and are likely to come across your article. There is a good possibility that these visitors will already have the alexa toolbar installed and thus will give your ranking a boost.

What now?

Well we're currently at a shockingly poor alexa rank of almost 5 million. We have implemented the steps above and we will review this article in just one month to see where our changes take our alexa rank.

We may also try out some other activities to improve out alexa rank, if so then we will update this article.

[Update]

So almost a week later 29/11/2009 and we have dropped to 4,429,661. Statistically our alexa rank should be updated again in a day or two so it will be interesting to see if we drop in alexa rank or climb. Our visitor numbers have remained pretty much even keel this week so its a possibility that just by placing the widget on the site has allowed alexa to better track the visitors to the site.

[Update 2]

Excellent news! Just checked the alexa rank by going to www.alexa.com and entering our url into the lookup site box and we have a good drop in ranking. The site is now currently at 3,271,327. More impressive is that we are now showing a ranking in the UK of 155,916. Despite these drops in ranking indicating an increase in traffic the traffic statistics show a slight drop in visitors by around 200 when comparing October uniques to November uniques. This is quite an impressive step. Certainly if you were looking to get a good alexa ranking then the widget does seem to be a good choice. It will be really interesting to see if we can obtain a further drop as more time progresses. As the alexa statistics seem to take into account a 3 month history then if this strategy is heading along the right lines we should be able to obtain a figure of around 1,000,000. Further updates to follow.

 

[Update 3]

Alexa has updated the results and as at 7/12/2009 our alexa rank is now reported as: 2,294,735. We have seen another drop in our alexa rank which is what we set out to achieve.

[Update 4]

Well its been well almost 2 months since the last improve alexa rank update. I've been a little busy hence the update delay but the figures have improved vastly.

The alexa rank is now 787,207. Since adding the alexa widget the uk rank has now registered at 40,168. A pretty impressive result just from a little bit of work. It is quite satisfying to see this increase in alexa rank in such a short period of time. Looking through the site statistics I can also see an increase in uniques too. Gaining about 10% on the uniques 2 months ago. I would not expect much of a traffic increase this month overall as its a short month.

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