What is Alexa Ranking and How to Improve the Alexa Ranking of Your Website

If you ask me to analyze your website, I can quickly tell you how it is doing by looking at its Google Pagerank and Alexa ranking.  Google Pagerank represents the credibility of your website in Google’s eyes.  Alexa ranking tells the traffic level of your website.  If you know a little about SEO (search engine optimization), Google Pagerank is not something new to you.  However, many people are not familiar with Alexa ranking.  What is Alexa ranking? Find out why it is important and how to improve the Alexa ranking of your website.

What is Alexa ranking?

Alexa.com uses Alexa ranking to evaluate the traffic to a website.  How does Alexa calculate the ranking?

Where do you stand in the crowd?
Photo taken by James Cridland

According to Alexa, “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).”   It not only shows your website’s global ranking but also shows its ranking in individual countries where it can be tracked.  Alexa ranks 30 million websites worldwide covering more than 125 countries.  The lower Alexa ranking number the better.  As of today, the top 10 Alexa ranking websites are: Facebook, Google.com, Youtube.com, Yahoo.com, Baidu.com, Wikipedia.org, live.com, Amazon.com, QQ.COM and Twitter.com.

What is the Alexa ranking of your website?  Where does your website stand in the crowd?  Dan Nickerson, the creator of Socrates WordPress Theme, once shared his opinion on Alexa ranking as the following:

• Over a million… Horrible
• Under a million… not bad
• Under 500k… good job
• Under 200k… well done
• Under 100K.. you’re doing awesome
• Under 50K.. can I buy your site?
• Under 10K.. can I work for you?
• Under 1K… can I drive your car?

Generally speaking, you want your website to have lower Alexa ranking and higher Google Pagerank.  If a website with high Google Pagerank and high Alexa ranking, it usually means that the website has good credibility but low traffic. Traffic is the lifeblood of a website.  So this kind of websites are most likely struggling to generate income.

Because Alexa ranking is an indicator of the website traffic, advertisers often look at Alexa rankings to decide whether they would run ads on a website and how much to pay.  The Alexa global ranking for JohnChow.com is 8101 and US ranking is 6765.  He charges for $1000 per month for a 728×90 banner.  If you want to build advertising income from your website, you should work on your Alexa ranking so that you can sell advertising on your website for a handsome profit.

How to improve Alexa ranking

Michelle Shaeffer has created a beautiful infographic on how to improve the Alexa ranking of your website.  I just want to highlight some key points:

• Claim your website on Alexa.com if you haven’t.  Be doing so, you can easily update your site’s contact information, update your site’s title and description and respond to user reviews of your site. Here is the link: http://www.alexa.com/siteowners/claim
• Install Alexa toolbar on your browser.  Here is the download link.  http://www.alexa.com/toolbar
• Get more traffic by building quality backlinks.
  There are many ways to build backlinks to your website.  You can build backlinks from link directories, blog commenting, guest blog post, article marketing, PR release, etc.
• Get more traffic by creating quality content on a regular basis and share on social media sites.  I suggest you write at least 1-2 blog posts a week.  Of course, the more the better.
• Ask your visitors to review your website on Alex.  You can easily built a Alexa review widget and place it on your website.  Get a Alex review widget here.  Please leave your review of goldenvisiontraining.com by clicking on the banner below.

Write down the current Alexa ranking of your website. Follow the tips shared in this blog and you will see the Alexa ranking of your website improved soon.  If you like this blog post, don’t forget to join our mailing list.  You will get free eBook + win iPad iPhone.