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How to Improve Your Website's Alexa Rank

How to increase your Alexa ranking? If you’re struggling to generate traffic to your website, you should focus on improving its Alexa Rank. Not to be confused with PageRank, Alexa Rank fluctuates based on traffic.

By making the right changes to your website, as well as its promotional strategy, you can achieve a lower Alexa Rank that results in more traffic to your site.

Alexa data traffic monitoring is one of the reliable source used by advertisers to determine popularity, visibility, performance and quality of websites. Its an easy competitor comparison way used in digital marketing strategy.

What Is Alexa Rank And How to Increase Your Website Alexa Traffic Ranking

Developed by Alexa Internet, Inc., a subsidiary of the e-commerce giant Amazon, Alexa Rank is a relative measurement of a website’s popularity, based on traffic, compared to all other sites.

The number of unique visitors and pageviews a website generates over the past three months will affect its Alexa Rank. The more unique visitors and pageviews a website attracts during this period, the lower its Alexa Rank will be.

In the astronomically unlikely event that your website generates more unique visitors and pageviews than all other sites, it will have an Alexa Rank of 1. As of 2020, google.com currently has an Alexa Rank of 1, followed by youtube.com with an Alexa Rank of 2. Regardless, optimizing your website for a lower Alexa Rank will increase its traffic and, therefore, help it succeed in its respective market.

You can check your website’s Alexa Rank at alexa.com/siteinfo or by downloading and installing the Alexa browser extension at alexa.com/toolbar. If your website currently doesn’t have an Alexa Rank, it probably hasn’t generated enough traffic in the past three months for Alexa Internet, Inc. to register it.

Update Old Pages to Increase Alexa Ranking

To optimize your website for a lower Alexa Rank, consider updating old pages by adding new content to them. Search engines analyze the frequency at which pages are updated when calculating search rankings.

If you rarely or never update a page on your website, search engines will assume you’ve abandoned it. They’ll bury the abandoned page at the bottom of the search engine results pages (SERPs) where it fails to generate traffic.

By updating your website’s pages, on the other hand, search engines will rank them higher because they contain fresh content.

Publish New Pages to Increase Alexa Ranking

In addition to updating old pages on your website, publishing new pages of relevant and engaging content can improve your site’s Alexa Rank. Each new page of high-quality content offers new ranking opportunities.

It’s not uncommon for content-heavy pages to rank for hundreds of keywords. According to Ahrefs, in fact, the average page in the top 20 search results ranks for roughly 400 other keywords. Granted, some of these keywords may only drive a few visitors each month, but this additional traffic can quickly add up if you regularly publish new pages of relevant and engaging content.

Optimize Images to Increase Alexa Ranking

Optimizing the images in your website’s content will encourage a lower Alexa Rank for your site. Whether they are JPEG, GIF, PNG or any other format, they should each have a relevant filename. Visitors generally won’t see images’ filenames, but search engines will check them when crawling your website.

Using relevant filenames assists search engines with identifying and understanding your website’s images. In turn, your site’s images may rank higher on Google Images and Bing Images, and the pages on which the images are located may rank higher in the standard SERPs.

Even more important than using relevant filenames, however, is giving your website’s images alternative text.

Alternative text is a type of HTML code that’s designed to provide visitors with a text description of an image. If a technical issue prevents an image from rendering, visitors will see the alternative text. Like with relevant filenames, alternative text allows search engines to better understand your website’s images, so using this HTML code may boost your site’s search rankings and, subsequently, lower its Alexa Rank

Increase Speed to Increase Alexa Ranking

Did you know that your website’s speed can affect its Alexa Rank? The average length of time visitors are required to wait for your website to load will influence the number of pageviews it attracts.

According to a study conducted by Aberdeen Group, each additional second visitors must wait lowers pageviews by 11 percent. If your website’s average load time is currently three seconds but increases to six seconds, for example, you can expect about one-third fewer pageviews.

And with fewer pageviews, your website will have a higher and less-attractive Alexa Rank.

Don't Syndicate Content to Increase Alexa Ranking

Avoid syndicating your website’s content. While syndicating content on other relevant blogs and online channels sounds harmless, it can raise your website’s Alexa Rank.

Syndicating content, of course, involves publishing your website’s content on other sites. Countless blogs will gladly publish your site’s content, typically with the following annotation: “This article originally appeared on example.com.”

Syndicated content, unfortunately, doesn’t give users an incentive to visit your website.

If you publish your website’s content on another blog, users may simply visit the blog to read it. Furthermore, syndicated content, by definition, is duplicate content. When Google or Bing encounters the same piece of content published on two or more websites, they’ll try to only rank the website that published it first.

There are instances, though, when search engines rank the wrong website. If search engines believe your website’s syndicated content originally appeared on a different site, your website won’t rank for that content.

Promote on Social Media to Increase Alexa Ranking

Promoting your website on popular social media networks can lower its Alexa Rank in several ways.

First, it will drive visitors directly to your website. When you create posts or tweets containing a link to your website, your followers or other social media users may click the link to check out your site.

Second, social media marketing drives higher rankings in the SERPs. Bing uses social signals, such as Facebook likes and Twitter retweets, in its ranking algorithm.

While Google’s algorithm isn’t directly impacted by them, social signals can still affect your website’s Google rankings. As your website’s social media profiles and accounts generate social signals, it will likely attract more backlinks.

Regardless of your website’s function, its success is dependent upon traffic. Traffic is the digital lifeblood that fuels your website’s performance. It brings visitors to your site, some of whom will click ads, complete forms or purchase products.

By optimizing your website for a lower Alexa Rank, it will generate more traffic.

How To Get A Good Alexa Rank Quickly

Compared to Google’s sophisticated SEO algorithms, Alexa is still in a relatively primitive state. Alexa is comparatively easy to manipulate and a single user can affect their Alexa rank in a way that isn’t possible with Google. In fact, if you have the means to change your IP address, then you can easily rack up the pageviews for your website.

If you want to boost your Alexa rank quickly, here are your options.

Understanding The Calculation

Exactly how Alexa analyses data isn’t clear. However, we do know that it involves some factors that you can control. Part of the equation is the result of Alexa’s behavioural analytics. This is beyond your control. But the number of page views/visits a page receives is a factor, as is the number of unique users. You can exploit this in two simple steps.

Install The Alexa Rank Browser Extension

If you are going to start working on your Alexa ranking, downloading the toolbar is a must. Not only does this toolbar provide you with information about the Alexa ranking of any websites that you visit, making research easy, but it also makes you an active part of Alexa itself. Alexa uses data about users’ browsing habits as part of the process of determining the popularity of websites.

While there is no specific information on the Alexa website, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that installing the Alexa toolbar can actually boost a website’s Alexa ranking instantaneously. This makes sense as, if nothing else, you will presumably now be adding to the number of Alexa users visiting your website.

Visiting your own website every day is a good idea. You can simply set your website as your homepage to ensure that you visit it the first time that you open your browser. Note that visiting a web page from the same IP address multiple times in the same day will not count as multiple page views. You can circumvent this by using multiple IP addresses. A VPN or proxy service will assign you a new IP address and make you appear to be a new user to Alexa. If you want to escalate through the ranks quickly, then you might as well give yourself as many page views as possible.

Publish High-Quality Content WIth A Regular Schedule

Here’s a piece of advice that will be familiar to anyone who has worked on SEO before. In the case of both SEO and Alexa rankings, the goal is to promote popular and relevant content so that users are getting the best experience possible. While it is possible to take measures to affect your ranking in search engine results pages or Alexa rankings, in both cases, it is much more effective to build your standing organically.

For example, you can always pay someone to link to your website, but if you are able to produce high-quality content on a regular basis, then these things will happen automatically. Not only will they happen automatically, but you won’t have to pay for the privilege.

As Alexa ranks become an increasingly common tool for comparing website performance, a good ranking becomes more important. Advertisers use Alexa rankings to decide which websites to advertise on. Popularity matters, and that’s what Alexa measures.

Is There Any Trick Or Short Cut To Improving Alexa?

With SEO taking up so much of their time, many website owners feel that they don’t have time to dedicate to their Alexa rankings. However, there are some things you can do to quickly improve your ranking.

How Does Alexa Work?

Alexa is designed to measure the relative popularity of websites. It achieves this by analysing the number of unique visitors that a website received in a three-month period and factoring in its own behavioural analysis. By using the data gathered from users of the Alexa toolbar, Alexa is able to understand how users interact with websites and, therefore, make deductions about what the behaviour means for websites’ popularity.

The way that Alexa works is much simpler than a search engine like Google. For website owners, this presents opportunities to enhance their Alexa scores without having to invest heavily. What’s more, an Alexa score can be raised comparatively quickly compared to SEO.

Proxy Power

If you want to boost the number of page views your website receives in the eyes of Alexa, you cannot simply connect repeatedly yourself. Alexa will treat multiple visits from the same IP address as a single visit; you cannot stack them up over the course of a day. However, if you have a method of changing your IP address, it is easy to bypass this limit.

The most common methods for doing this are to use either a VPN or proxy. A proxy is better if you want to significantly inflate your page views because you can use a rotating IP address, whereas switching IP addresses regularly on a VPN is more of a hassle.

If you have the technical know-how to configure a bot to automatically visit your website, leave again, rotate to a new IP address, and then visit the website again with a new IP, generating pageviews is easy.

Racking Up The Pageviews

Visiting your own website multiple times from different IP addresses will trick Alexa into thinking that multiple unique users are accessing your website. It is remarkably easy to manipulate Alexa in this way, especially when you compare it to the measures that Google takes to prevent black hat and artificial SEO.

Of course, if you can convince other Alexa users to visit your website organically, then this is preferable to using a proxy. Remember that Alexa considers user behaviour and this limits the benefits of a large number of page views. At some point, you need to generate some user interaction.

Make Sure You Have The Toolbar

The Alexa toolbar is essential if you care about your Alexa score. Not only does the toolbar provide you with Alexa information about any websites that you visit, but it also enables you to contribute your data to the project. Visiting your own website with the toolbar installed counts as a visit. Set your website as your homepage, and you will automatically visit it every day.

If you want to rapidly increase your Alexa ranking, the best way is to produce some high-quality viral content. If you can get users coming to your website regularly, you won’t just have the pageviews; you will have that precious audience interaction as well.

What Is That Alexa Rank?

“Alexa, what’s an Alexa rank?” According to my Alexa, “Alexa Internet Incorporated is a web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco.” Thanks, Alexa!

“Hey, Google, what’s an Alexa rank?” According to Google, Alexa rank is a measure of a website’s popularity. It elaborates, drawing directly from the Alexa blog, revealing that Alexa ranks are relative, making it a useful key performance indicator for benchmarking.

So, Alexa has a way to go in terms of search, but its ranking system is worth getting to grips with.

How Does It Work

Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon. Both parts of the business remain tight-lipped on exactly how Alexa calculates its rankings. However, given the enormous computing power that Amazon has at its fingertips, it isn’t that surprising that they have been able to achieve this.

As per the company’s own blog, “Alexa ranks are calculated using a proprietary methodology.” In other words, they aren’t telling us how it’s done. But what they will tell us is that an Alexa rank combines both a snapshot of visitors over the last three months and the anticipated volume of traffic in the near future. The data used to make these predictions comes from a “global panel,” a sample that is supposed to be representative of internet users in general.

How Accurate Is It?

This is the million-dollar question. The consensus seems to be that in terms of providing an accurate picture of the internet as a whole, it isn’t very accurate. In other words, Alexa ranks don’t really tell us, not with the same accuracy as Google Analytics, what the 100 most popular websites on the internet are, for example.

However, in terms of comparing the relative popularity of different websites, Alexa ranks are useful. The disparity between performance here is almost certainly down to coverage and data. Google has a much bigger market share and a considerably bigger vault of data to call upon.

Should I Optimise For Alexa Like I Do For Google?

Alexa is still relatively young. Anyone who remembers Google when it was young will know that there are important lessons a burgeoning tech megacorp needs to learn through experience. Alexa didn’t have the natural growth that Google had. Alexa was pumped full of cash from the moment of its inception, taking advantage of the vast streams of data already flowing through Amazon’s website. As a result, Alexa still suffers from some glaring issues.

One of the most notable issues is that, as of the time of writing, it is still possible to write a little script to continually open your website and artificially inflate your pageview count. This is the kind of basic ‘hack’ that Google has long since inoculated itself against.

That said, if you are optimising your website for SEO anyway, you don’t need to do anything special to appeal to Alexa; it isn’t like Google in that regard. If you are producing good content regularly, you will be getting a steady flow of page views. If you are also keeping your metadata in order and following SEO best practices, you will maximise your Alexa rank.

Overall, it is worth being aware of your Alexa rank. If nothing else, it is a useful measure of relative popularity. If you aren’t sure whether you are currently adhering to SEO best practices, schedule a call with me today, and I can help you work out what you need to do.

How Is The Alexa Rank Analysed?

Alexa rankings are becoming an increasingly popular metric for comparing the performance of different websites. But there is still a lot of mystery surrounding exactly how it works. Here’s what we know so far.

Sample Data

The big question with a service like Alexa ranking is where the data is coming from. We will come on to what is being done to that data shortly, but for now, let’s focus on the data itself. Of course, like any huge tech business, Amazon has access to plenty of data about its users. But the date that Amazon holds on its users is not much use when it comes to ranking websites. In order to give websites a relative ranking in the way that Alexa does, it needs to have data about the websites themselves.

There is plenty of analytical data about websites that is free and instantly available. This data can easily be worked into Amazon algorithms in order to enable them to use existing data as part of the ranking process. Alexa combines this data with data that is gathered via the Alexa toolbar. The Alexa toolbar is a proprietary browser toolbar that users can install in order to view information about web pages that they visit. This information includes the page’s Alexa ranking and links to other pages that are similar in nature.

Alexa bundles data from toolbar users together in order to provide what it describes as a representative sample of all internet users. Data from these groups can then be used to make predictions about general user behaviour and engagement. It is the results of this analysis that Alexa combines with data about website traffic, to give a meaningful measure of popularity.

How Is The Data Analysed

Amazon is naturally tight-lipped as to exactly how Alexa works. They simply say that the rank is calculated using a proprietary methodology. They do go on to state that the method uses a combination of page views over the last 3 months and average daily unique visitors.

But beyond that and explaining that the Alexa rank is a measure of relative popularity between websites, there is not a lot of information to go on in terms of exactly how the Alexa ranks are determined. Amazon themselves certainly aren’t saying much.

Is It Accurate?

However the algorithms work on a mechanical level, we can’t still evaluate the results that they give us. In practice, what really matters is whether Alexa can compete with Google. In terms of accuracy, Alexa seems to be accurate for comparing the relative popularity of websites, which is its purpose, after all. However, it falls down when it comes to returning any precise data points.

When compared to Google analytics, there is still no competition. But it is important to remember that Google is the gold standard here. No other entity on earth has access to the vast reservoirs of data that Google does. With so much data to use, you would expect Google’s results to be stellar.

No one other than Amazon knows for sure how the Alexa ranks are calculated, and it seems that they want to keep it that way. In addition to their toolbar, Alexa is widely believed to use third-party data but, again, Amazon won’t say where from.

How to Increase My Website Alexa Traffic Ranking Fast

Last Updated in 2022-12-28T18:57:27+00:00 by Lukasz Zelezny