Alexa Ranking? Whether or not it’s accurate as debated for years, it has some real value in the web industry. Webmasters, Bloggers, Developers work hard to improve the Alexa ranking of their websites/web properties to showcase them as the best. There are several reasons why the potential webmasters want to increase the Alexa ranking of the website. If you’re the one among them, find the straight forward ways to boost the Alexa rank of your website within the shortest period.
Besides, if you’re the newest entry to this industry, you can learn why it’s important that your website should hold on to a decent spot in the Alexa Ranking.
So what? Alexa Rank is cool? Let’s start and push your website to some good position!
What is Alex Rank? An Introduction to Alexa Ranking:
Alexa.com was the property of Alexa Internet, Inc. started its journey in 1996 as a web traffic analysis company based in San Fransisco, USA.
In 1999 Alexa was acquired by Amazon thanks to Jeff Bezos.
Initially, Alexa was a toolbar that collected basic behavior data of the websites, analyzed it to queue the websites from best to worst on Alexa Ranking.
In the later period, Alexa started to include new ranking techniques to make their rating precise and accurate.
The Alexa Ranking is considered as one of the important factors to rate the popularity website similar to other trademarks like Moz Authority and Majestic Flows.
Be advised that the Alexa Ranking doesn’t include SEO factors of a website like Moz and Majestic. Alexa Rank mostly depends on traffic based factors to rate the domains.
Why it’s Important to Have a Good Alexa Ranking:
Does Alexa Ranking even matter? Yes definitely! The Alexa Rank of a domain can increase or decrease its value.
The first thing a person would do to check the value of the website is to verify it’s Alexa Rank.
The first impression is the best! While the Alexa Rank alone doesn’t make a website great, a good Alexa Rank would be a positive sign.
Here are some of the reasons why it’s important to increase the Alexa Ranking of a website.
- The brand value of the domain will increase with higher Alexa Rank.
- A good Alexa Rank will make the website valuable in the web industry.
- You will get an honor of achievement for your hard work which will increase your confidence and urge to grow.
- Online marketers take Alexa Rank as a serious indication to rate the website.
- Create a direct relationship with clients and pro bloggers with higher Alexa Rank.
- Advertising networks and affiliate networks users Alexa Ranking as an important factor to approve new applications.
- Quality sites with Alexa Ranking below 100k are considered eligible to do direct advertising.
- Quote higher CPC by getting ranked higher in tier – 1 countries. International marketers and clients prefer this.
Tips to Increase Alexa Ranking of a Website:
Now you know the reasons to improve Alexa Rank of a website, here is the list of tips which you can follow to increase Alexa Ranking of the website.
1. Increase your Website Traffic:
The number one factor that is going to have a greater impact on the Alexa Raking is website traffic.
Websites with the most number of visits will hang on to the top spot of the Alexa Ranking.
If your website is new, it’s going to take a few months to reach the top spot.
Old websites can see a quick gain in Alexa Ranking as the traffic improves.
Speaking about traffic, it should be Organic or from the authentic source(s). Never buy any cheap traffic just for the sake of increasing Alexa Ranking.
Work on your page SEO and link building to reach the top 10 in SERP which will eventually drive more traffic to your site.
Being an analytics company, Alexa considers quality web traffic as the main ranking factor.
2. Write content for readers not to generate traffic:
While Alexa is not a search engine that looks for quality content, your website must have great content whether it’s a blog or an online business.
If you’re a blogger, you must concentrate on writing high-quality content that should keep the readers engaged.
Do not write content for search engines, or with the sole purpose of driving traffic. It’s not going to help
3. More time on site:
When the visitors are going to spend more time on your site, it’s going to improve Alexa Ranking.
Visitor’s time on site is one of the important ranking factors out there to rank higher.
Let me explain you with an example. When I started blogging, I had a good friend who thought a lot of things about growing my blog.
He had great content on his blog but he had no idea about driving a good number of organic traffic.
While his blog roughly received 500 visits per day, my blog reached the first milestone of 1000 visits per day.
But when I compared our Alexa Ranking, I found his blog was ranked a bit higher compared to mine.
When I was analyzing his blog’s analytics, the time on site was way too high with 8 minutes per session and the bounce rate was very low.
So, it’s very important to have great content on the website to keep the visitors engaged for more time on site.
4. Lower the Bounce Rate of your site:
Another important factor that matters is the bounce rate.
Bounce rate refers to people leaving the site immediately or after a few minutes without making interactions on the website.
The lower the bounce rate is, it’s going to help increase Alexa Ranking.
Again great content is the key for a lower bounce rate. If the visitors find the content interesting, they will explore further which will eventually reduce the bounce rate.
You can even apply certain strategies on your website to lower the bounce rate.
- Do proper internal linking relevant to the topic that should make the visitor click.
- Add an exit pop up that should lead them to useful content.
- Add related content widget at the end of the content.
- Try to add other important elements to your blog based on the category that should keep the visitors engaged.
5. A Neat Web Design:
Alexa is not going to rank the website based on its design.
But, it’s advised to have a neat website design assisted by pleasant light color and a decent layout.
Of course, web design plays its part in lowering the bounce rate and increasing the time on site.
So, try to choose a simple, well-coded theme that loads quickly for your blog from an authentic theme seller or hire a professional web designer for a custom design.
6. Links from quality sources:
Gain backlinks from high-quality sources like relevant blogs and websites.
Mass link building is not going to help with increasing SERP. No rank means no traffic, no traffic means poor Alexa Rank.
So, work on building a better link portfolio that should help to grow the blog in the long term.
7. Keep it updated:
You must update your blog regularly.
Adding new content and updating the old content is important to show your web property is still alive and useful to the visitors.
Make sure to update your blog at least once per two weeks. You can vary the frequency based on the trends.
8. Work on networking:
Create a bond between businesses and other webmasters to get exposure to your website.
Besides, you may even work on social media marketing to improve your reach.
Pinterest has been a great source for webmasters to promote their brand.
9. Go active on Forums and Discussion boards:
Create a chance to meet new people via forums by joining discussions.
While this does not have anything to deal with increasing Alexa Rank, you’d have the chance to create more exposure.
You could learn, drive traffic to your website without spamming, promote all at the same time.
10. Get Alexa Pro certified for accurate ranking:
Get accurate results from Alexa by getting certified buying one of their pro plans.
It’s not worth the small webmasters to go for a pro plan.
Sites with high traffic can go for Alexa pro plan, get certified by Alexa to stand in the exact position where it should be.
The Certified Alexa rank plan starts at $19/month.
Getting certified will create trust among online businesses and advertisers. This will be helpful to create an immense growth in the business over time.
Direct Advertising and Alexa Rank:
Direct advertising is one of the key moments of success for any website.
While any website or a blog can publish ads from established networks such as Google Adsense, Media.net, etc. it’s not anything different from what other webmasters do.
It’s easy to publish ads via networks to earn money. Like growing the traffic to some extent, applying for an account, publish ads right away.
Selling direct ads is an art! It’s an achievement where everyone cannot sell ad spaces directly to an advertiser just like that.
The website should be an established one, that must have a connection between the visitors and the website. Also, it should have a purpose with relevance.
Advertisers will be ready to spend a huge amount of money to create a direct relationship with such websites.
Why I emphasized the direct advertising in this article is that when an advertiser decides to advertise on a website, the first thing they will do is to check the Alexa Ranking of the website. The Alexa Rank helps them to get an outline of the website.
This is one of the main reasons why serious webmasters should work on increasing Alexa Ranking.
Why you shouldn’t chase Alexa Rank instead wait for it to increase by itself:
Now if you’re the one chasing ways to improve Alexa Rank, stop it right away.
Alexa Rank is just an indication of your website’s popularity in the world of the internet. It has got nothing to do with your growth.
So, stop chasing the Alexa Rank and start building a strong base by adding valuable content and networking to see the Alexa Rank automatically increase over time.
Working only to reach a comfortable spot on the list is worth nothing.
When does the value of website’s Alexa Rank is considered worth:
Once, your website starts to grow then the value of Alexa Rank increases. Here are some of the reasons why Alexa Rank has a high value.
When you start approaching other businesses and blogs to create a relationship, the Alexa Rank is going to give them the confidence that your website has some value.
As said earlier, the advertisers love lower Alexa Rank.
By placing your website in a decent spot on the Alexa Ranking list, you can expect established authors’ approaches to writing content on your blog.
Alexa Rank for Small Bloggers:
While the Alexa Rank does matter a lot for the high traffic established websites, the new small doesn’t have to worry about the Alexa Rank initially.
Instead of checking the Alexa Rank daily start working on building your website both on-page and off-page.
Things you shouldn’t do to Increase Alexa Ranking:
These are some of the black hat techniques that people advise which you should never follow.
Stop looking for Alexa Rank boosting services:
There are a lot of online services that promise to boost Alexa Ranking within a month or a few.
You should never approach such services to manipulate the Alexa Ranking of your website.
It’s not going to help you in any way instead, it is going to lower your confidence level and stop your growth.
Instead, work on building your website brick by brick to see the Alexa Rank increase based on your hard work.
Do not try anything odd to increase the Alexa Rank:
Few suggest to artificially carrying out some process can help improve the Alexa Rank. But, doing such a thing might hurt the website.
This includes paying to low-quality third-party services to increase the traffic.
Using VPN services to create self-triggered traffic.
Deploying bots to artificially increase website traffic.
Installing toolbar to manipulate the Alexa Rank, etc.
Indirect consequences of doing bad practices to increase Alexa Rank:
Beware of some of the indirect consequences of trying to increase Alexa Rank with bad practices.
Getting caught by Google for Policy Violations:
Google Adsense:
If you’re a Google Adsense publisher trying to implement bad practices to increase the traffic of your website, be aware that you might be caught by Adsense for policy violation.
Google Adsense never allows its publishers to run their ads on the site which receives traffic from unauthentic source(s).
There are chances such accounts will be suspended or disabled for sending invalid traffic.
Google Webmaster Guidelines:
To increase the Alexa Rank, you might try to add content that adds no value to the users.
Or involve in link schemes to artificially manipulate the search results.
According to Google webmaster guidelines, it’s considered a website is not eligible to be listed in the Google SERP if it doesn’t adhere to their guidelines.
Become a victim of spammers:
Once you’re into some bad practices, you cannot come out of that very easy.
Even if you’re out at some point, the third parties might be a great problem stopping your progress.
So, never get involved in any bad practices to artificially gain benefits.
Fake tales about increasing Alexa Rank:
1. Alexa Toolbar plays an important role in ranking websites:
It’s a wrong fact that Alexa uses the toolbar installed in the browser to collect data to rank websites.
The truth is Alexa does not use the toolbar to measure the traffic of a website.
2. Pro Plan gives an additional boost in Alexa ranking:
The pro plan is just to give the certified value. Paying Alexa won’t increase your site’s rank.
3. Instant traffic hike would increase Alexa Ranking:
If a website gets even up to a 1000% increase in traffic within a day, it’s not going to affect the Alexa rank.
Alexa uses data from the past three months to rate a website.
That’s all about how to increase Alexa Ranking. If you’ve got ideas to share, feel free to leave a comment below!
Informative