Alexa Rankings – Quick overview, tips and downloads

I’ve recently gained interest in the Alexa Rankings and wanted to read and learn more about how it works and ways to increase your rankings. I will provide some very helpful links as well as a quick breakdown of Alexa, so you can see a quick summary of how it works.

What is Alexa?
Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon.com that provides information about web traffic.

How does it measure?
Statistics derive from webpage visitors who have the the Alexa toolbar installed. So, the more of your readers who have the Alexa toolbar installed, the higher ranking you’ll get. Your visitors who don’t have it installed aren’t counted and analyzed. The update to their ranking system may help balance this out a bit.

What is the purpose of getting a higher ranking?
The higher your Alexa Ranking, the more worth your link is to advertisers.

Problems?
Alexa doesn’t look at the entire amount of traffic, since many who visit don’t have the toolbar. Their updated ranking system should help with this.

Updates From Alexa
Alexa posted an announcement on their site. They have improved their sources, normalized their traffic globally and created new and improved algorithms, to get better indications of web traffic. This is good news.

How to Increase your Rankings
Dosh Dosh has a terrific article with 20 tips to increase your rankings.
MarketingScoop has 7 tips to use.

Downloads
Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer
Alexa Toolbar for Firefox
Search Extension for Firefox & Mozilla – Shows Google Rank, Alexa Rank, Alexa incoming/outgoing links & related links.
Alexa Traffic Widgets

My Results, So Far
My ranking went from 7,061,154 to 4,130,697 already. So far I installed the toolbars, added the widget to my site (at the bottom), set my blog as my homepage and posted this article. Not a bad increase for just 1 day.