Healthy Moms - parenting, pregnancy, health, and women's issues: Why Alexa Rank is Important to Bloggers

Healthy Moms - parenting, pregnancy, health, and women's issues: Why Alexa Rank is Important to Bloggers

Why Alexa Rank is Important to Bloggers

>> Monday, April 6, 2009

Some of you may not be familiar with Alexa so I will fill you in. Alexa is a website that ranks other websites based on the traffic that they receive. The lower the Alexa rank the more traffic the site gets.

Why is Alexa ranking so important to bloggers like us? Advertisers use the Alexa rankings to determine whether or not they will advertise on the particular site or not. Your Alexa rank also helps paid review sites decide how much to charge advertisers for a review on your blog. If you have a lower ranking chances are you will get more offers from advertisers to write a review for them.

If you are like me and treat your blog like a business, improving your Alexa rank should be a priority. Some people say that Alexa is not very accurate and biased towards webmasters. This is because they track the visitors through the Alexa toolbar. In other words, the only visitors being tracked by Alexa have their tool bar installed on their web browser. If you are a mommy blogger like I am chances are a good majority of your visitors do not have the toolbar installed.

Webmasters understand the importance of the Alexa toolbar so most of them have it installed in their web browser. Here are some tips that I've learned from researching Alexa rankings on the web.

First thing that you should do is install the Alexa toolbar and set your blog as your homepage. Next put up an Alexa rank widget on your blog. You should also encourage your readers to install the toolbar. Be sure to link to Alexa's full explanation of the toolbar and tracking system so that they understand the importance.

If you work in an office or company with multiple computers find out if you can install the Alexa toolbar in all their computers and set your blog as the home page. This will only work if those computers have different IP addresses.

Another great way to improve your Alexa rank is to write or blog about Alexa. Webmasters and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their rankings. You might get more links to your blog and more targeted traffic.

Visit webmaster forums and show off your URL. Webmasters usually already have the toolbar installed so they will visit your site.

You can also write content that is related to webmasters. Tag your posts domaining and SEO. Promote your content on social networking sites and webmaster forums. Create a webmaster tools section on your blog. Webmasters will probably visit your site often to access the tools.

Submit your popular blog posts to social networking sites such as Digg and Stumble Upon. Encourage your visitors to make your blog their home page. Low cost advertising such as pay per click campaigns on search engines like Google or Exact Seek can also help bring in more traffic. This is even more useful if your ad is attractive to webmasters. You can also optimize those popular posts with an Alexa widget or graph along with the link to your site information on Alexa. Use Alexa redirection urls for your internal links. For example mine would be http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.thehealthymoms.net


Create an Alexa category on your blog and list news or articles about Alexa.

Visit webmaster forums and purchase banner ads, link ads or hire forum posters to post about your blog. You can buy signatures from them or promote specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis. Visit Digital Point to find posters for hire.

Use Alexa redirect whenever you place your link on another website. Make sure you get your blog listed on as many search engines as possible by submitting it to DMOZ. This is the largest human edited directory on the web and is co-branded among hundreds of thousands of sites. It might take up to 5 months before your website is listed so have some patience.

I hope this information helps you to be able to create a business out of your blog like I have. For more tips on how to increase your Alexa ranking visit these great articles.

20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank
Increase Alexa Rankings
Alexa Toolbar and the Problem of Experiment Design
7 Proven Strategies for Improving Your Alexa Ranking