WebHostingBlog

How does Alexa ranking work?

Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon.com that records traffic to numerous sites on the Internet by counting unique visitors to a site’s main page through an entire day. Using this data, Alexa then gives a ranking to each site. The lower the rank, the more traffic the site has.

There are a few areas to take note about Alexa rankings. Firstly, Alexa collects traffic ONLY of users who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their computers. Due to this factor, it does not represent the entire Internet population.

Personal homepages (e.g. blogs) have their traffic recorded like all other sites. But they are given an asterisk (*) to differentiate them. Only unique visits to top level domains are counted. This means that if a single user visits a site multiple times in a day, Alexa will record this as only 1 visit. All site rankings are given to a site by traffic that is collected and collated over a period of 3 months.

Why is Alexa ranking important?

Alexa ranking has a significant impact because it can give you an estimate of how well your marketing strategy is working. If your ranking goes up, this means more traffic is coming to your site. The best use of Alexa ranking has arguably got to be comparing your site’s ranking to that of 3 months ago. This will show a more or less accurate trend of your traffic increasing or decreasing. Also, Alexa ranking is important because it lets webmasters and advertisers see the potential of marketing your site. The lower your ranking, the more they would be willing to buy advertising space on your site.

How to improve Alexa ranking?

There are a few methods to increase your site’s Alexa ranking. To start off, visit Alexa.com, then download and install the toolbar. Set your site as the homepage of your browser. This way, whenever you start up your browser for the first time in a day, you will be adding one count to your site visit.

Post classified ads (either free or paid) at popular sites with huge amounts of traffic (e.g. Craigslist.org, Ablewise.com and USFreeads.com) to boost traffic to your site. This will in turn improve your Alexa ranking.

Webmasters usually have the toolbar installed in their browsers. Insert your homepage URL into your signature in webmaster forums. This will in turn get webmasters to visit your site and add visit counts to your site.

Write articles that are related to webmasters (e.g. Search Engine Optimization content), and promote them. Get Dugg or Stumbled as this will usually bring about a spike in your site traffic and in turn, get your Alexa ranking up.

Alexa ranking is a standard taken by general netizens to judge the quality of a website. Hence it is important to strive to achieve a high ranking. But do take note that Alexa ranking alone does NOT represent the entire Internet population. A site without a high Alexa ranking does not mean that site is not enjoying an expected amount of traffic, even though a high ranking does often mean high traffic.

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Anti-spam math answer: (Required)*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the answer to the math equation shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the equation.