How to Increase Alexa Rank

A few weeks ago I covered 5 affiliate marketing tools which no affiliate marketer or marketer online in general should be without.
One of the free tools was the SEO Quake toolbar which I like to use for getting immediate analytical information when it comes to the pages I'm surfing and one of the most interesting stats it will give you is a domain's Alexa rank. There are other ways to find this stat, but the Alexa rank is generally considered to be one of the most reputable metrics of a site's quality.
You can learn all kinds of information about any website you're browsing for free without needing access to their Google Analytics to see it using Alexa.
Likely the most important information/stat is a site's Alexa rank itself which is seen as a testament to that site's worth/reputation. In case you needed more proof of this, Google itself and Facebook occupy the numbers 1 and 2 positions on Alexa, respectively.
But how is this number calculated and how can you increase your Alexa rank?
How to Increase Alexa Rank
This number is the product of two significant statistics when it comes to your site: traffic and page views. Traffic is how many unique visitors your site receives per day and page views refers to how many pages on average a person views on your site.
Alexa looks at both of these stats over the past 3 month period of your site. So not only do you need consistent high levels of traffic, but you need people to spend a lot of time exploring your site, getting your bounce rate (the percent of visitors to your site whom leave your site on the same page them came in on without visiting any other pages) as low as possible.
Getting your Alexa rank as close to #1 as possible should be a major priority of yours as a webmaster because it happens by virtue of doing things which you should already be doing in optimizing your site. Getting your bounce rate as low as possible by serving up as much unique and informative content as possible as well as getting your traffic levels higher and higher.
Additionally this rank is (potentially) a mark of achievement and authority for your site; and it can (potentially) be a great way to attract advertisers and get them to pay to have their advertisements shown on your site.

For more information on how to increase Alexa rank, check out these posts on 70+ ways to increase website traffic and how to lower bounce rate.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Paul_M_Ventura

What Is An Alexa Website Ranking?

Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California based subsidiary of Amazon.com, founded in 1996. Its name is a tribute to the Library of Alexandria, drawing a contrast between the globe's largest repository of knowledge in ancient times and the net today. They offer internet search engine and webcrawler services, and also website archiving on behalf of the Internet Archive non-profit organization. (These archives can be accessed through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine digital time capsule. For people considering different forms of search marketing Alexa can be very useful.
Alexa's ranking system tracks the popularity of internet sites around the world. It bases its ranking schema on the level of traffic each site receives from the number of individuals that check out a site by having the Alexa Toolbar installed. They describe it this way: The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of webpage views and users reach. As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of web page views for all websites on the World wide web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based upon the geometric mean of these two amounts averaged over time so that the rank of an internet site reflects both the number of individuals who visit that site in addition to the amount of pages on the site viewed by those individuals.
A site's Alexa Rank suggests precisely how popular that site is, based upon the number of site visitors over the last 90 days. This is a top-down rank, with 1 indicating the most preferred address, and greater numbers suggesting less preferred websites. For example, EzineArticles currently has a rank of 131, suggesting there are only 130 websites more prominent than them. At the time of this writing, there are ~ 18 million sites ranked by Alexa.
It ought to be noted that Alexa is able to only collect traffic data from users who have set up the Alexa Toolbar software; because not everybody has or wants this software program, it necessarily follows that Alexa cannot give a complete picture of a site's traffic. They themselves have stated that just the top 100,000 ranks can be considered truly precise; sites rated above 1 million don't obtain enough Alexa-enabled traffic for their positions to be statistically meaningful. This can be demonstrated by setting up the Toolbar, visiting a website with very poor positioning (someplace in the millions), and hitting the browser's refresh button repeatedly - such a website's Alexa positioning would improve considerably within minutes, but that cannot be taken into account an indication of their typical traffic patterns.
Additionally, because the Toolbar collects information pertaining to the websites gone to by individuals and delivers this information "home" to Alexa, lots of vendors such as Symantec and McAfee categorize the Toolbar as adware, spyware, or various other possibly undesirable programs. Not everyone wants this kind of software program on their computer system due to privacy, which restricts Alexa's audience further. For people interested in search marketing there are better tools out there but from a straight popularity standpoint Alexa is very useful.

Titan Web Marketing Solutions is a Website Design, Search Engine Marketing, and Graphic Design Company that helps small businesses increase sales. If you have a small business in Middle Tennessee and need web design in Nashville TN or web design in Cookeville TN then call us at 615-890-3600.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Cash_Miller

12 Ways to Rapidly Improve Alexa Rank of Your Blog

12 ways here to be introduced to increase Alexa rank of your blog. Hope some will be helpful for your situation.
1. Install Alexa toolbar and set your blog as the home page. As you know, Alexa rank is determined on the basis of the information collected by the Alexa toolbar. Only the click of the visitor who has it installed will be counted when he visits your website. As the webmaster of a personal website, the first thing you should do is to install it on your own browser and set your blog to be the home page so that every time you open IE, you make a little contribution to your own site for Alexa rank improvement.
2. Install Alexa toolbar on all computers you can touch. And set your blog as the home page. Encourage all people you know to install Alexa toolbar.
3. Put up a Alexa counter widget on your blog. When it is clicked, it will be counted as traffic by Alexa, even if the one who clicks it does not install the Alexa toolbar.
4. Write some articles about Alexa on your blog. You can even open a Alexa column. Many webmasters would like to see these things. If you write good articles, they are likely to republish or link to them, which also can bring you traffic and hence help to increase Alexa rank.
5. Go to where webmasters often visit and post the URL of your blog there. Generally, webmasters have Alexa toolbar installed. You may go to some webmaster forums to write posts promoting your blog.
6. Tell friends to vote for your blog on Alexa website. Though it is not sure how much this will benefit your blog's Alexa rank, it is better to have a good rating.
7. Write the columns that webmasters would be concerned about, such as an SEO column, to attract more webmasters to visit your site.
8. Use Alexa redirection function.
9. If possible, go to some foreign forums or websites to promote your blog, for foreign surfers often install the Alexa toolbar.
10. If you have sufficient funds, you may consider buying some pay-per-click ads for your blog. That can bring abundant IP.
11. Add links to Alexa relevant content in your most popular articles on your blog, or use Alexa redirection to link to other places of your blog.
12. Buy professional service to boost Alexa rank. Of course it is stable, safe and effect-guaranteed.

More information at http://improvealexaranking.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sophia_Zami

Page Rank Vs Alexa Rank - What Benefits Your Internet Business the Most?

In a world with just ten sites for the keyword "Hotel", there is no need to perform any ranking on any of the sites and return the results as such. But with millions of sites for a generic keyword like "Hotel", it is inevitable to come up with ranking algorithm to be fair to the good sites. There are several ranking schemes to rank a website, each having their criteria of ranking. So a web site developer should not be bamboozled by the numerous jargon and end up producing a messy site. Before developing a site, the developer must identify the precinct in which the site is going to fall and design the site according to that particular ranking scheme. So Alexa rank and page rank being the major ones, need to be analyzed to determine the way to go.

Alexa rank is a system where a site's rank is determined by the traffic received by a site by people with Alexa toolbar installed whereas page rank designed by Google is largely based on link building. A high amount of inbound links will increase the page rank although page rank is not solely based on links. It is influenced by other factors too like keywords. The exact number and kind of factors contributing to page rank still remain hazy. But it is largely based on links, keywords and tags.

A superficial glance would reveal that Alexa rank does not count the mass appeal of a website; rather it acts as a tool that ranks sites with more technical users. Alexa rank does not give the true rank a site deserves. This is because, it measures rank based on the traffic from users who have the Alexa toolbar installed. A normal web user may not install Alexa toolbar, or may not even know what it is. A site that is frequented by such users will be at disadvantage than a site that is frequented by webmaster and tech users, who know enough to install Alexa toolbar. So the former is ranked far lesser than the latter even if the number of users and credibility is higher.

Page rank is a comprehensive ranking algorithm that takes into account, not just that traffic it generates, but also the usability of the site. In other words, page rank takes the responsibility of increasing the traffic of a deserving website on its shoulder by listing it in the top search results. Page ranking is used as a gauge for professional link building services.

But this should not deter one from ignoring Alexa rank. Because Alexa rank, imperfect though it may be, is used by webmasters and commercial ad networks to determine the worth of a site and the Alexa rank fixes the price of advertisement on one's site.

If advertisement revenue holds the key to monetary gain from building the site then Alexa rank is the key factor that should be considered more important than page rank. But to all the others, page rank is still the best out there.

Bob D Williams has been involved in the seo field for over ten years. Working in various SEO services but specializing in link building services. And in search engine optimization, professional custom videos and more.

http://www.googlelinks.net
http://www.spike.cc/blog

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bob_D_Williams

The Importance of Your Site's Alexa Rank

Why is the Alexa ranking of your website or blog so important?

How reliable is the Alexa ranking system?

According to Alexa, they gather web traffic statistics from web surfers who have installed the Alexa Toolbar, or from website pages that display an Alexa Widget.

This means, that visitors to your site that do not have the Alexa Toolbar installed will not contribute to your ranking unless you address this by adding a simple to install graphical widget to your website's sidebar, header or footer. This way, when any of your sites pages are visited a request is made to Alexa's system to retrieve your site's current rank and at the same time Alexa will record the request as a qualified visit to your site and your Alexa rank will be adjusted accordingly.

All Alexa ranks are based on the preceding three months traffic data collected and an average trend rank is calculated when comparing this data against all other sites contained in the Alexa database.

The trend rank of any site is calculated according to the following criteria:

1. Reach - the percentage of global internet users who visited the site.

2. Pageviews - the percent of global pageviews the website received

3. Pageviews/user - a calculation of the pageviews per visitor to the site

4. Bounce rate - the percentage of visitors to the site that closed the site after visiting only a single page.

5. Time on site - an average calculation of the time spent on the site by each visitor

6. Search percentage - the percentage of visits to the site that were referred from a known search engine.

Alexa have recently stated that its toolbar has achieved over 10 million downloads worldwide, but I am unsure as to the duration this claim refers to. I am confident to assume that a very large percentage of toolbars will remain installed are being installed and therefore continue to contribute to the accuracy of the Alexa ranking system. But, this does however highlight the need for webmasters, who wish to gain the best rank possible, to install an Alexa widget on their sites.

Although not everyone in the web development industry believes that Alexa is a reliable popularity ranking system, Alexa (an Amazon company) remains at the forefront of the website ranking world and receives worldwide recognition of this. I recently searched Google with the keyword "website ranking", and the results were clear. It was Alexa.Com who was at the top of the search results.

In contrast to Google Pagerank systems, the lower a site's Alexa rank number, the higher the rank is. Google operate a system in reverse where a higher number indicates a higher rank. At the time of writing this article, Goole ranked no. 1 on Alexa's Top Sites list, closely followed by Facebook, Youtube and Yahoo.

But, with all this said, what does having a high Alexa rank do for your site?

Your site's rank is very important for recognition and website monetization. Many website flipping businesses use Alexa to assist when making a calculated decision regarding the financial potential of a website on the open market. There are also websites that provide website value estimations, and once again a website's Alexa rank is used when making their calculations. Businesses such as these feel that the Alexa rank to be a very useful tool in determining the overall popularity of a site and in turn the potential financial viability of the site.

A high rank could imply high traffic and this often attracts advertisers when looking for potential advertising space. For those looking to move into the affiliate marketing industry, a high rank is often required by product and service sellers before they allow membership to their affiliate programs. This way they feel confident that their products or services are being advertised by sites with good traffic and therefore a good reputation. Websites with lower ranks are often rejected.

Tracking the movement of a site's Alexa rank is a very important practice for any web developer or blog owner. By keeping a close eye on the movement of the rank in relation to changes made to the site, a web developer or blog owner can make informed judgements on the effectiveness of changes or additions to the site and then act accordingly. But Alexa.Com does not offer tracking facilities to any websites that are ranked over 100,000 and as a result the only way to track changes has been to visit Alexa.Com every day to obtain the results yourself and record them in your own way. Perhaps as a spreadsheet or in a note book. A Google search of the term "Track Alexa" can provide some great tools for doing this for you.

In conclusion, although a million or two Alexa toolbar users and Alexa widgets cannot give us an exact ranking on the popularity of every website currently being served to the world wide web, the information Alexa provides can give us a basic idea on the general traffic a site receives and where the traffic is mostly being referred from. Alexa rank is important to any website because it provides recognition, increases the potential of monetization and provides important information that will help web developers improve the quality of their sites by improving the sites visitor experience. So tracking your site's rank is exceptionally important.

Colin Cunningham
Founder of TrackAlexa.Com
http://www.trackalexa.com

TrackAlexa.Com - Track Alexa Ranks For Domains Ranked Over 100,000

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Colin_J_Cunningham