02.26.07

Improving your Alexa Ranking & Earn More with Text Link Ads

Posted in Traffic Generation, Blogging for Profit at 1:20 am by admin

I have a link to check my Alexa ranking in my Firefox toolbar, and do so almost every day; Usually just after I check my internal server logs just to see how closely Alexa matches these statistics. Although some will dispute the validity of Alexa ratings, major advertising networks such as AdBrite and Text Link Ads use Alexa ratings regularly to price advertising on publisher websites — this means that you should care about your Alexa rating, and check it regularly!

Alexa ranks are determined in a similar manner to how Neilson TV ratings are generated — the browsing habits of a small portion of the population are monitored through a client-side installed browser toolbar and then multiplied by the estimated total Internet user population to determine total traffic to a particular website. Recently, Alexa updated the way which it displays the “Reach” statistic. Previously, this measure was a quite confusing number to understand; Now, it is given as a percentage of all Internet users. I find it quite interesting to know what percentage of Internet users visit my website — even the smallest percentage multiplied by 1,093,529,692 (World Internet Statistics) is quite a large volume of traffic. To put things in perspective, Alexa currently ranks Google as receiving 24.2% of global Internet traffic, whereas CyberWyre received a peak of approximately 0.05% of Internet traffic in June 2006 (which was so much traffic at the time that my server had connection issues)

How to Improve your Alexa Rank

So you want to find a way to improve your Alexa rank and hopefully, increase your payout per link sold on your site. Well, first you have to recognize the weakness in the way that Alexa ranks websites. In order for Alexa to obtain a sample of the world’s Internet browsing habits, it relies on it’s users to install a browser plug-in toolbar which sits just below the Address bar in both IE and Firefox. Would your mother go out of her way and install an extra tool bar into her browser? Would she even know how to do this if she wanted to? I know that mine wouldn’t. You can use this fact to your advantage: right away you know that Alexa ranks your website based on the browsing habits of GEEKS!

So how can you attract more geeks to visit your website? Try posting a few lists on your website and submitting them to popular sites such as Digg.com or Del.icio.us. Lists are great to link to and always receive lots of traffic. Even though these geeks may not click on any of your advertisements or purchase anything through your affiliate links, they will surely help to improve your Alexa ranking. Check out some previous CyberWyre articles on traffic generation for more tips on this.

Secondly, you yourself should download and install the Alexa toolbar and get some free hits to your rank every time you visit your own page. Finally, encourage your readers to download the Alexa toolbar so that every future visit from them will count towards your ranking. Best of all, you can customize the toolbar which you provide to your readers to include a direct link back to your site in the toolbar, and actually earn a commission from any Amazon purchase made by that user (Amazon owns Alexa).

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