Truth about Methods to Raise Alexa Ranking

There is a lot of information on the web about Alexa and how to raise a website’s ranking. Most of it is outdated and inaccurate. I compiled up to date information about Alexa and try to dispel some of the myths in my article that explains what an Alexa ranking is and if you should care. There are additional myths and bad advice on how to raise an Alexa ranking. I will discuss some of those in this article. If you are like me, you are a busy person and don’t have time to waste on bad advice. Some of the articles out there, even most of the ones at the top of the search engine rankings on the subject, are just wrong. They have bad ideas, waste your time, and some of them are actually counterproductive and could result in you losing traffic. There is no magic bullet for Alexa ranking, but there are some things that will help.

Here are my top 10 tips for increasing your Alexa ranking

1. Increase traffic to you website. Bottom line is that increased traffic is the best answer. If you get enough traffic by default enough people will have the Alexa add-on to boost your Alexa ranking. For a better Alexa score, boost your traffic, and as a bonus increased traffic is the key for improving all search engine rankings as well.

2. Increase inbound website links. Alexa and all search engines look at the number and quality of links to your website from other websites. The higher ranked the website that links to your website the more it helps your Alexa ranking. This is true for improving all search engine rankings as well.

The first two tips on this list are by far the best and most important. The remaining tips will marginally improve your ranking, but will not sustain a top ranking over time. Some of these ideas you should be doing, and the others you may wish to avoid. This information will help you make those decisions:

3. Install the Alexa toolbar. You can find the download here at the Alexa site. Will it help a lot? No not a lot, but with Alexa ranking it is mostly about how many times a site is visited by people with the Alexa toolbar add-on installed. So, you should have the browser loaded on all of your computers. Load it on your kids PC’s and your spouses.

4. Have all of your friends install the Alexa toolbar. If you have good friends that will install it then just ask them to do it, and then have them visit your site multiple times each day. If you think they will not be interested, be sneaky and put the browser on their PC’s when they aren’t looking – just joking… sort of. Every hit on your website by a browser with the Alexa toolbar is a good thing.

5. Set home page to your website. It’s all about traffic and if you set all of the browsers in your home, friends browsers, and relatives browsers to your webpage you will increase traffic (just make sure they all have the Alexa toolbar). With Mozilla Firefox you can have multiple home pages, which is great for those people who would be irritated if their favorite website did not come up first. Set up a second homepage on their Mozilla Firefox for your webpage. The person may not even notice if you leave the first tab as the their original homepage.

6. Install the toolbar and set the homepage at other prime locations. This idea may not be available to most of us, but if you can pull it off it’s a great one. If you or someone you know has legal access to a web cafeteria – a site with multiple PC’s set up for public use – load the Alexa toolbar on all of them and set all of the homepages to your site. Realistically, most of us won’t be able to take advantage of this one, but if you can it would get you a lot of traffic, and some of that traffic may actually stay a check your site out.

7. Register your site on Alexa. I am not sure if this helps or not, but part of the Alexa toolbar has a link to rate a website. You may as well enter your website and rate it! You probably should get a good rating from yourself at least. Having your site registered with Alexa must be a good thing. Also, my site was not ranked at all my Alexa until after I registered it, so this may kick-start your website ranking.

8. Install an Alexa widget. Okay, this is one of those urban legend ideas. I only put this on the list so I could address the absurdity of it. What it may do is kick start Alexa to start ranking your site, but it will not increase your score. It’s just a nice little display that tells you and all of your visitors what your score is and how many external links you have. I have read in some articles that people will be required to install the Alexa toolbar if you have the widget on your site. This is not true, and furthermore who in their right mind would think that is a good idea!  I don’t trust sites that have pop ups, nor those that require me to install something. With all of the computer viruses in the world most people feel the same as I do. Those people who don’t know what the Alexa toolbar is will not likely install it under those circumstances. I would rather have a visitor without the Alexa toolbar, than turn the person away. So, if you hear that there is a way to make people install the toolbar, great make them do it if you want, but it seems counter productive to increasing traffic to me.

9. Create content for Webmasters. If your website has content geared toward webmasters you will likely attract people to your site that have the Alexa toolbar loaded. It will help. But not all websites are conducive to that type of approach. A cooking site will be hard pressed to create an angle that will include webmaster interests, but you can give it a try!

10. Rank increase sites. There are several rank raising sites out there that promise you if you buy credits, or earn credits my viewing other sites they will have other members view your sites. The idea being people sign up for the service; they view other people’s sites; and then we all raise our Alexa rank together. It’s a giant site viewing club where everyone wins. In theory it’s a good idea, but there are several problems with this approach:

a. Many of these sites have gone by the wayside and are no longer active.

b. It takes a long time and a lot of viewing to earn enough credits to raise your site’s ranking significantly.

c. You will have to spend money if you really want to be successful with this approach, and the problem is you could be throwing your money away if the site does not have enough members to support your needs.

d. This is not a long term solution. If this method is used to increase your rank you may not have the visitors required to sustain the ranking, thus you will be forced to keep doing this approach.

e. A good Alexa ranking does you little good if you don’t have steady traffic. Without traffic there is no one to click your advertisements for Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising earnings, and you will get no impressions for Pay Per Impression (PPI)advertising. No clicky; no looky; no money. You may get higher in the search engines this way, which may result in increased traffic, but it is still not a sustainable approach.

f. This is at best a short term solution to get your ranking up for the benefit of advertisement and possibly adding some traffic.

g. To my knowledge you can’t use this method to get too far up the ranking, so Alexa is not overly concerned about it, but if you do this too much you may risk getting your sight banned.

h. I ran some tests on two of the ranking sites (the two that I felt comfortable using) and had mixed results.

i. First, I tested upmyrank.com. It has an auto serf feature that is not really that automated. Sometimes it will run for 30 minutes and other times it will get bogged down with annoying pop ups. Then you have to reset the browser, or click through the pop ups. Some of those are very annoying and it can take several times to get them to stop. I earned 1000 credits and applied them, which should have got me 1000 visits. My site counter on my test site only jumped up about 600 visits, but it only took about 45 minutes to get those visits. I am not sure if the surfing method used by upmyrank sometimes fails to set the counter or if I only got 60% of the visits I spent my credits on.  Further testing results in about a 60% hit counter rate.  The good news is that on my test site after applying 1300 visits/credits, in addition to doing the other suggestions on this list, the test site’s Alexa rating moved up by nearly 15,000,000.  This is a significant increase.  You will notice that your sites ranking will fluctuate up and down in the process.  My testing also found that the browser autosurf worked better in Mozilla Firefox than it did in IE, but I did not test this on multiple systems and configurations, so that is nonconclusive.

ii. Second, I tested rankraise.com. This is a manual viewing method. The site directs you to push a button on the browser window and it advances you to the next website. I earned the minimum amount of credits and applied them to my test site. In two days I only had about 12 visits through the service. The credits used are tracked by the rankraise website, so I was able to see exactly how many visits they sent me. 12 visits is not worth the trouble.

iii. It should be noted that both of these sites suffer from an irritating problem. It looks like a lot of the sites that use the rank raising site use them to try to sell other people who use the sites, like you, services, tools and gimmicks to raise your Alexa ranking. So, as you click through the sites you continually are forced to look at advertisement sites trying to sell you something to improve your website traffic, or rankings. Very irritating and I would wager that other sites will suffer from the same thing.

iv. Purchase a rank raising services are services that you pay to increase your ranking. There are plenty of those. I do not trust them, so I have no opinion. My experience with the rank increase sites where you earn ranking credits was not an overwhelming success, so I was not about to plop down the cash and have it walk away.

v. I also do not trust the rank raising toolkits you can purchase. Those are advertised everywhere. It seems that if there was really a well kept secret for raising your Alexa ranking, someone would have provided it by now in all of the free articles circulating the web.

There may be other options out there for increasing your Alexa ranking, but these are the most commonly discussed and the most likely to actually help you. If you know of any other legitimate methods for raising your ranking tell me about them. I will update this article and keep it current.

Important Notes - Here is the good news and the hard reality:

• Following these suggestions I was able to improve the Alexa ranking on my test site by 15 million within 1 week.  Obviously, some of these suggestions will take longer than a week to impact your score with any significance, but in the short term these steps work.
• The sad news my tests reveal, sad for anyone who does not follow these suggestions, is that most webmasters (I use the term webmaster loosely to refer to anyone who manages a website) must not really know what they are doing.  I was able to bypass their ranks in one week’s time doing very little work.  I perhaps put in 15 hours in this week between testing the ranking sites, doing research, and drafting my articles.  Obviously, there are a lot of webmasters doing nothing, so you should be able to jump out in front quickly if you devote time every week to these suggestions.  I do not expect to put in 15 hours every week not that I have my processes in place.
• Some more good news is that you can do all of these suggestions.  Again, if you are doing them and most webmasters are not, you will be successful.  I guarantee it, or your money back!  Hmm… you are not paying me for this information are you?  Wow! I should put some cheesy and irritating pop-up adds with operators ready to take your money for information that is otherwise free.  I’ll get to work on that, until then use this information freely.

Bottom line. Increase traffic. That is the key to Alexa and all search engine rankings.

If you found this informative, please Digg it, Stumble it, submit it to Delicious, post it on Facebook or Myspace, and above all tell a friend. You are our best resource!

Author: Jeff Harris
Copyright © 2010