Improve your Alexa rank

If you are thinking of monetizing your new website you should consider imporving your Alexa rank. Most advertisers and advertising serives like Text Link Ads, Sponsored Reviews etc. use Alexa Rank to determine the worth of a link on your web site. Alexa rank is the level of traffic your site received from Alexa toolbar users. The better your Alexa rank is the better price you can get for publishing ads on your website. From Alexa website

What is Traffic Rank?

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 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 the geometric mean of 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.

Fortunately, it is not very difficult to improve (manipulate) your Alexa rank. DoshDosh has a list of 20 suggestions to improve Alexa rank. I don’t recommend that you try all 20 of those suggestions. I tried following simple tricks and my Alexa rank improved within weeks.

  1. On all your computers set your browser homepage to your own website. (No brainer!)
  2. Install FireFox SearchStatus extension. If you are (still) using IE install Alexa toolbar.
    I highly recommend that you start using FireFox with SearchStatus extension it is more useful than Alexa toolbar.Download FireFox with Google Toolbar and experience the difference.
  3. Try Alex auto-surfs. I used RankRaise. I did get a lot of traffic through them.

I did all these steps in Decemeber last year and my Alexa Rank started to improve with in weeks.
Here is table of my progress.

Date Alexa Rank
12/06/07 3,727,809
12/12/07 3,540,994
12/21/07 1,954,520
12/27/07 1,224,569
01/03/08 808,613
01/08/08 717,350
01/09/08 707,255
01/14/08 683,911

Not bad, huh?

DoshDosh also suggested to use Alexa redirect URL trick. I used it for few days but then I realized that it is not a good idea. What if Alexa changed their redirect URL? Then you will have lot of code to clean up so I don’t recommend using Alexa redirect.

Share your thoughts and the steps you are taking (or have taken) to improve your Alexa rank.
Good luck!