Alexa.com defines themselves as “the web information company,” but to webmasters and bloggers, they are so much more. Essentially, Alexa is a company that measures web traffic on almost every website on the internet through their increasingly popular toolbar plugin. This becomes an important element in leveraging your blog’s ranking as a sell point to advertisers, sponsors, buyers, readers and whoever else wants a piece of your material.

Why is this important? Alexa rankings can make or break your business.

Before you freak out, let me explain how this plays out. Essentially, the way Alexa.com is measuring your website’s traffic is one of the most unfair surveys around. Why? Well they only record hits on your blog if it passes through their systems… meaning that your visitors need either the Alexa.com toolbar installed or you need to have a widget displayed on your website.

Advantage internet/technology bloggers. As a whole, the tech readership crew is much more likely to have an Alexa toolbar installed than your typical user. What this means for non-tech focused websites is that they are going to be seen as having less traffic than others.

So I have less traffic according to some company… who cares!?
You need to start caring about your Alexa.com ranking if you aren’t already. As much as it pains me to say this, they have a monopoly over the sector. As advertisers move away from the unreliable “Google Pagerank” service, Alexa Ranking is the next logical sell point to move towards (and eventually destroy ).

Your Alexa ranking is used as a big factor in valuing the advertising space on your website by, I would say, about 85% of advertisers. A higher positioning means more money in your pocket. Alexa rankings are being used increasingly to leverage blogs, despite the fact that the numbers can be horrendously manipulated. More high paying reviews, better advertising offers, more press coverage, it is a must have.

What can you do to improve your ranking?
So you have a less-than-stellar rating, don’t worry… you can improve and manipulate this pretty easily. Here are the top three things you should be doing, anything else is water under the bridge… so when you read a post “the top x ways to improve your Alexa ranking,” they are making most of it up out of thin air.

1. Place an Alexa.com widget/plugin or chart on your website
2. Install the Alexa toolbar on your own computer and encourage your readers to do the same on their computers
3. Write popular content and get SEO optimized for traffic

Pretty self-explanatory, throw an Alexa widget up on your website. Why? This logs your visitors even if they don’t have a toolbar. Essentially, this can make up for visitors not having toolbars of their own (though not entirely). I have heard reports of HUGE gains after installing an Alexa chart or widget. They offer them to you on the website for free, so you should be taking advantage of their offer.

Other than that, you need to have the traffic to push your ranking up, so keep writing interesting content that is dense with information so you get the search engine positioning and page views that you need. Your ranking is based on your last three months of traffic average traffic, so while my weekly average is currently under 100,000, I am registering a 273,000 Alexa ranking. This will take some time, so be patient and keep writing.

Alexa.com ranking is important, so you definitely shouldn’t underestimate its influence on your earnings. Don’t get freaked out if your rating isn’t so hot, because there is more to life on the web than statistics alone. But if you simply don’t care, you need to start caring because you are missing out on potential income by having a poor rank.

-The Net Fool

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