Why Alexa and How to Increase Your Alexa Rank Free SEO

First, what is Alexa? What is the Alexa rank? Why should you care? Good questions. Simply put:

• Alexa is a Website ranking site owned by Amazon.com
• Alexa is one measure of how popular your Website is.
• your Website is given a rank, or position, relative to all the other Websites that are visited by people using the Alexa toolbar for Firefox (my favorite) and the Alexa toolbar for Internet Explorer.
• every time someone, who has the Alexa toolbar installed, visits your Website your Website gets a Brownie point. In this case, we can call it an Alexa point, I guess. Alexa also tracks how many pages that person viewed on your Website. Alexa then produces your average weekly rank and three month rank, and average pages viewed by visitors to your Website, etc. The rank basically tells you how far away your Website is from the coveted #1 spot now occupied by Yahoo.com or Google.ca (they seem to switch places daily). So, if your rank is 26,000,001 then you are 26 million positions away from the #1 spot. You want to be in the top 100,000. That is where you get the glory, and Alexa actually starts showing more traffic details about your Website at that point. There is even a report of the top 100,000 sites. You might get an offer from someone to buy your Website or advertisers might pay you more for better exposure to their ads on your website. Lots of benefits if you get into the top 100,000.
• most Alexa toolbar users are techies, i.e. people who know how to install add-ons to Firefox, Internet Explorer, and want such information as that provided by Alexa. For this reason, many argue that the Alexa rank is biased and not representative of the true popularity of your Website. Nevertheless, it is one such measure and it is used by a lot of people. So, get over it!
• some affiliate companies like ReviewMe, Text Link Ads and Sponsored Reviews use the Alexa rank to determine your payout.

So, how do you get high on Alexa? To impress everyone, and start making some good affiliate income with partners like ReviewMe, Text Link Ads and Sponsored Reviews you need to increase your Alexa rank. So, how do you do it? Here are some good, and some sneaky (blackhat?) ways to do it.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar for your Web browser. Set the home page in your browser to be your Website – thus at least you get one Brownie point from yourself every time you visit your site!
2. Encourage your friends, spouse, ex-wife, doctor, whoever you know to install the Alexa toolbar and set the home page on their Web browser to be your Website. Sneaky, huh?
3. Write content that might be enticing to techies or webmasters. I know this might be hard if your Website is about “bananas”, but you can always throw in a “special” article about how “bananas” are a Webmaster’s favorite snack food or something – be creative! Techies will be drawn to it and since they are more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed, you will have more chance or getting more Brownie points for Alexa.
4. Blog about Alexa. You’ll draw another crowd of people interested in getting their ranking high – who most likely already have the Alexa toolbar installed.
5. Write comments in techie forums and leave your URL there – most comment systems let you leave your name and URL.
6. East Asian Websites and forums seem to be frequented by a lot of Alexa users, so post in those forums too.
7. Create a Alexa tools Web page and write about all the tools and techniques related to Alexa.
8. Buy some ads on Google using PPC to draw in the crowd to your Website.
9. Use social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, and many more to leave posts that include your Website URL.
10. Post good content!

There are other techniques but these are the best and should be enough to get your Website ranked high if you do all these things consistently…and frequently. Remember, writing good content should be your primary focus, so that alone is worth a ton at drawing people to your Website and getting high on Alexa!
Note that the once popular Alexa redirect such as http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.steveatwal.com no longer works so don’t bother reading about it. People were using it to change their internal Website links to increase their Alexa ranking and some even went as far as creating WordPress plugins for this. Weird blackhat techniques, but don’t bother – I think Alexa caught on and blocked this.