What is Alex Ranking and How to Improve your Alexa Ranking

We get occasional questions from readers, which we want to put it up here so others may benefit from it as well. If you have question regarding blogging, you can ask in comment or send us via contact form. We will try to get around to answer as often as we can.

Recently a reader Megan asked this question:

“How can I increase my Alexa Ratings? Isn’t it based on traffic? I have 171 unique visitor and my Alexa Rating is the same?”

What is Alexa Ratings?

Alexa is traffic ranking site, they provide traffic ranking based on either Alexa toolbar or data gathered from other traffic data sources to show you site’s or blog’s traffic rank. Lower the traffic rank, better the traffic usually is.

So What is Traffic Rank? And how does Alexa computes it?

Following is the excerpt from Alexa’s website on how they compute the complex algorithm to find traffic rank for a blog or a website:

“The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on a value derived from these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.”

How do you improve your Alexa Rank?

When your blog or website is new, it will be unranked. As you post more often to your site and slowly increase the traffic to your blog, your Alexa rank will improve with time. Meanwhile there are a few ways that has worked for others to improve Alexa’s ranking. There are no sure fire ways that has worked and Alexa ranking is not always consistent. Please look at the a few ways one can improve Alexa’s ranking.

Quality Content: There are many ways to manipulate system but if you want to keep the solution for long term, quality content that is useful to your readers is the best option in our opinion. Also daily or frequently updating your blog post also helps, compare to blog or website that is sitting without updates for long period.
Install Alexa Toolbar: Alexa often gives rank based on the popularity of website by alexa toolbar. Therefore, install an Alexa toolbar to your site and set your web blog as a homepage.
Display Alexa Widget: We have used it in our other blogs and it has worked for us. We have not installed on this blog to experiment the usefulness for this, and may change it after period of time. Some experts are saying that each click counts as a unique visit, making your traffic rank higher, I am not sure about it but this sure works for many blog sites.
Talk about Alexa and Review it on your Blog: We have noticed that blogs that Alexa reviews or focuses on webmaster’s issues seems to have better Alexa rank. While many blogs may not be focused on webmaster issues, you can still improve alexa rank by writing article about Alexa and asking others to join in may help as well.
Improve your Traffic: One can improve traffic to his or her website by writing guest posts, commenting on other blogs or writing a articles in article directories such as hubpages, can help increase the traffic, hence improving the Alexa ranking.