8 Tricks You Can Use to Increase Alexa’s Traffic Ranking

Yesterday I wrote about 5 tricks some people use to increase their Alexa’s traffic ranks. The point of the post is not to say that Alexa is totally useless but the methods I described do not usually help in improving the rankings.

To the general web surfers, Alexa’s traffic ranking means almost nothing. But many advertisers and ad networks use Alexa to gauge whether it’s worth spending money and pay the site owner to advertise on the site.

If you are a blogger trying to make money from Text Link Ads or ReviewMe, having a good Alexa ranking put you in the position to charge more on your ad inventory.

I’ve been repeating this point several times in my previous posts. If you want to make money from your website, putting some effort in improving your Alexa ranking will be worth your while.

On the other hand, if you are not trying to make money from Text Link Ads, ReviewMe or you are using ad networks that disregard Alexa traffic, you can ignore Alexa because it won’t make any difference to your bottom-line. Similarly, if you are selling your own products via AdWords, having a good ranking won’t help you sell more products. So, this post is for those whose Alexa’s traffic rankings affect their bottom-line to a certain extend. Here are ten tricks to increase your Alexa ranking.

1. Install Alexa Toolbar

   If this look likes a contradiction to the third point in my previous post, it doesn’t. There’s no need to install Alexa toolbar on several different computers if they all share the same IP address. Unless of course, each computer access your site alternately on different days.

   Once you set your site or blog as your homepage, you’ll start seeing some increase to you ranking albeit a very small one. This tips works if you have a brand new site. Download Alexa toolbar here.

    

2. Recommend Alexa Toolbar to Your Users

   Write a review about Alexa, similar to what I am doing now and tell your users why Alexa can be important to them. Invite your friends to use Alexa toolbar and explain why it’s beneficial to do so. Make sure they are aware of the privacy issue associate with using Alexa toolbar.

   Again if you have a new blog or site, you’ll notice an increase in your ranking soon.

    

3. Create Contents that Appeal to Webmasters

   Since we know Alexa stats is skewed towards webmaster traffic, put this to your advantage by creating contents that attract webmasters and tech savvy readers.

   I’ve demonstrated this when I compared the Alexa stats for Sabahan.com and a political blog in the 50 most influential blogs in Malaysia. In that article, I pointed out that while the political blog gets more traffic daily, Sabahan.com enjoys better Alexa ranking even with lower traffic level only because its content attracts webmasters, bloggers and tech savvy audience.

    

4. Take Advantage of the Social Bookmarking Sites

   Submit your blog posts to the social bookmark sites like digg, and Stumble Upon or reddit.com. Even if you don’t get to the front page, some visitors will still end up on your site. Since this traffic is targeted to your content, someone might find them useful enough to link to your posts from their blogs.

   Obviously your ultimate aim should be to get into the front page and bring the traffic surge that could significantly impact your Alexa’s traffic ranking.

    

5. Create Sub Domains or Run Multiple Blogs Under One Domain

   Alexa merges together sites which they think have the some content. The merged sites would have their traffic combined to form one ranking and listed under the main domain.

   To take advantage of this, you could create another site and run it under a sub domain of your main site e.g. http://seo.sabahan.com You could offer webmaster tools section to attract webmaster traffic.

   If you have extra bandwidth and web space to spare, offer free blog hosting to your users and host them under sub domains, e.g. blog1.sabahan.com, blog2.sabahan.com, blog3.sabahan.com etc.

   Your will enjoy a greater Alexa ranking as it’s a combination of all the blogs rankings under that domain.

    

6. Get Involved In Chinese Sites

   That is, if you know Chinese. There are many Chinese websites ranked highly in the Global Alexa top 500. To some extent, this reflects the high adoption of Alexa toolbar among Chinese Internet users.

   If you could create a sub domain and run a Chinese blog that attracts Chinese users from China, you could potentially enjoy a greater Alexa ranking.

    

7. Remove Unnecessary Secure Pages On Your Site

   Since Alexa toolbar turns itself of on secure pages (https:), sites with secure page views will be under-counted in the Alexa traffic data. So if you have many secure pages, consider disabling them if that doesn’t compromise on your users’ security.

    

8. Create Great Content

   Great content attracts readership which translates into more traffic. On the Internet, content is king and some say traffic is the queen. Like everything else, focus on your effort in creating valuable and useful content. Give what your readers want.

   When you got traffic, your Alexa’s rank increase will follow. One good example I can give is the DoshDosh.com blog. Its Alexa ranking jumped from around 3 million in January 2007 to around 7,149 in just over six month all due to its great content that’s targeted towards webmasters.

   

Due to the statistical limitations of the sample of Alexa toolbar users, Alexa is unable to accurately determine the ranking of sites with fewer than 1,000 total monthly visitors or about 30 visits per day. Therefore, in order to be taken seriously by advertisers, you need to get below 100,000 in your traffic ranking, any higher is regarded as not reliable. Obviously the closer you get to number 1 the better.

Have I missed anything? Please share your tips in increasing your Alexa’s traffic rankings in the comments.