Alexa rank is a service provided by a company recently acquired by Amazon. The original website was started back in 1996 but became a subsidiary of Amazon in 1999. It ranks websites according to the number of unique visitors and the number of page views in the last 3 months. It is a generally a popularity list for websites. If you want to know your Alexa rank all you have to do is access their official website, type your sites name and hit enter. They provide information on more than 30 million websites.

 

 

How does it work

 

You may now be wondering how they actually gather all this information. For a while they solely used a toolbar that had to be installed to the browser to collect and send information. As of 2008 they also acquire information from browser extensions. These browser extensions collect data from all the various users and send it to their website where it is analyzed and a complete report is produced. They have about 25,000 different browser extensions. They target the most common browsers; these are Chrome, Firefox and internet explorer. After they have catered for those who might have been left out, we get a list of websites ranked according to popularity.

 

 

Why is Alexa rank important?

 

The first and obvious importance is that it provides a universal method of ranking all websites. It may not be exactly accurate but it is not biased to any particular website. You get an idea of how your site is fairing when compared to the many other websites worldwide.

 

The many features provided by Alexa rank also benefit webmasters in that, the information can be used to modify the website or to know where to place ads to get the most revenue. A website administrator gets to know which pages are visited most and where visitors spend the most time.

 

This can be useful in knowing where to apply more effort in enhancing user experience. It also provides demographic information such that the web designer could maximize the traffic by adjusting the content to encourage the users to stay in the site for longer hence increasing Alexa rank.

 

My website is not in the top 100,000 Alexa sites

 

Even if your site does not show up in the top 100,000 websites, Alexa rank can still be of use to you. It allows you to compare your site with your competitors site. This helps you know whether you need to change your strategy or keep doing what you are doing.

 

The higher you are ranked the more you can be paid for ad space. If you are highly ranked it means your website has accumulated enough visitors to be noticed. When companies or individuals look for advertising space, they will prefer the website with more visitors to get the most exposure. Once you are ranked high enough you can charge higher for ad space. It also helps when you are looking to sell your website. Buyers are attracted by high Alexa Rank and it gives you room to play around with the price.

 

Alexa Rank is also considered in search engine optimization. Search engines such as google take into consideration the Alexa rank of a website to determine where to place it in their results. A higher Alexa rank means the website is acknowledged by many users to be providing what they need. Search engines would therefore prefer to provide such a website among the top so as to make work easy for the user.

 

Increasing Alexa rank comes in handy to improve SEO.

 

The higher you rank in Alexa Rank the more trustworthy your site appears. If you are a blogger, the more people trust and look to your site for information the better for you. This ensures more traffic and in a way Alexa itself is helping to advertise your website.

 

 

How to increase your Alexa Rank

 

First of all, you should go to their official website and register as the owner of your website.

 

To start getting noticed on Alexa Rank, you should now install the Alexa toolbar in your browser and visit your site often. This tells Alexa that people constantly access your site.

 

You should also add the Alexa widget to your site to get data from those visitors who do not have the Alexa toolbar installed. It works the same as the toolbar and ensures all your traffic counts.

 

You could also encourage your users to go to alexa.com and write reviews about your site.

 

Conclusion

 

For all those who thought Alexa rank is not that important, we hope we have changed your mind. If you really want to make a business out of your website or blog then you should take Alexa rank really seriously.