Friday, 9 October 2009

Improve Alexa Understanding

By Nigel Evans

Anyone who is involved in the world of online marketing must be aware of the existence of Alexa, the company, owned by giant Amazon.com, known for providing a range of statistics about website traffic. Some experts advocate the importance of this company, while others have a question, yet most seem to want to improve Alexa ranking where at all possible, even though it is accepted that Google Page rank is of more importance to a site owner.

If you want to improve Alexa rank, you need to understand what it is. The company's ranking system is based on the level of traffic received by a website, where the visitors are measured only if they have an Alexa toolbar installed. While there are many millions of Alexa toolbar users, this does only represent a relatively small part of the entire Internet world of course and thus many would question the credibility of the readings obtained.

For many, it can be a goal to be seen as within the top 100,000 websites. Alexa provides quite a lot of information on their website about such sites, including graphs depicting visitor levels and so on. While many dispute the authenticity of the program, it is still true to say that a low ranking is seen by some as a measure of prestige, prompting webmasters to improve Alex a ranking as much as they can.

Critics are particularly vocal about the Alexa toolbar related approach, as they say that many of the people involved in the process of search engine optimization are aware of the concept and have the toolbar installed. This, they say, skews the results and does not represent the world in general. Although there are certain things that you can do to improve Alexa, fundamentally you must be attracting traffic to score.

One of the easy ways to improve Alexa ranking is just to download the toolbar and install it, as an extension to Firefox or Internet explorer. Simply by setting your target webpage as your home page on the computer, you can start to send results. Draw people's attention to Alexa by installing a ranking widget on your website and you can also do this by building in a plug-in on your WordPress blog.

By interacting with people who are in the same line of business as you, especially if this is Internet marketing or search engine optimization, then you will automatically start to build your site's position and improve Alexa rank. You should try and get everyone who visits your website to download the toolbar or extension and make sure that you sign up and display your URL as often as possible on web master or Internet marketing forums.

Go out of your way to provide great informative information on your website and you will find that your traffic will naturally increase. If you're in the field of Internet marketing, a large part of this traffic will be Alexa enabled and you will have made considerable improvements in your ranking automatically.

There are a number of black hat and questionable techniques that you can use, including redirects and auto surfs, but these are not recommended. As some advertising networks put great emphasis on your results here when it comes to ad spend, you may be particularly motivated to improve Alexa positions, but do not do so at all costs. There are many other ways to improve your website's visibility and position and they should all be viewed carefully. Consult experts who are in a position to tell you your best course of action. Look for dedicated forums, many of which are located within Internet marketing membership sites for access to this expert information.

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