If you’ve been in the website game for any more than a couple of months, you’ve probably heard of an Alexa Ranking.

Alexa has a very respectable hold among webmasters, for it is often used as reference when determining your relevance.

For some webmasters, your Alexa Rank may seem scary when sitting at three million. Luckily, it’s extremely easy to enhance it in a short period of time.

To make navigation easier, you can use the below links to jump to parts of the article:

• Factors of Alexa Score
• Improving your Alexa Score

Understanding Your Alexa Score

Alexa is a service that is of a rare breed – without any code being installed on your website, it can detect (to a point of accuracy) your traffic.

The idea in itself is mind boggling, but is quiet simple if you look at how your score is determined. It is all possible through their Alexa toolbar.

While there are two main factors we know for a solid fact that Alexa uses to judge your rank, many other factors might have relevance.

Confirmed Factors:

Is the Toolbar Installed?

Alexa is unique in the way it “measures” your traffic and relevance. Instead of requiring a code on your website, it collects data from users who install the Alexa Toolbar.

It is highly suggested that you install the toolbar, as well as encourage your readers to grab a copy for themselves.

With data collected from the toolbar, Alexa generates a ranking for your website.

Reach

Reach is just what it sounds like – how many people your website reaches.

Using the toolbar data, Alexa can figure out how many users access your website on a daily basis. That number is known as your reach.

An easy way to think of reach is the amount of people your website reaches out to.

If you were to try and track this number in Google Analytics (or a similar traffic-tracking software), you would look under the visits tab.
Pageviews

Pageviews is pretty self-explanatory, much like your website’s reach. Pageviews reflects the number of  pages viewed per user on your website.

If a user enters your website and views the homepage, two blog posts, your about page, and the contact page, you just earned yourself five pageviews!

Unconfirmed Related Factors:

Site Speed

Website speed plays a slight role in your Alexa Ranking.

While Alexa doesn’t document the speed of your website having any bearing on the ranking of your website, it does provide statistics about it, so it most likely has some relevance.

Any website speeds below two seconds are thought to be good (and below one second is extremely fast), so try your best to keep it in that range.

Luckily, it is very easy to improve your site loading speed in all of about fifteen minutes.

Improving Your Alexa Score

Toolbar-Enhancing Code

In a sense, Alexa is quiet biased towards niches that aren’t in the tech industry – most of the viewers of the websites don’t use the toolbar.

For that very reason, a simple solution was developed to help trick Alexa into believing each user uses the toolbar.

While in a chat room with Nicholas Cardot, Keith Bloemendaal, and several others nearly two years ago, a genius code was developed:

 

To use the code, you must replace “ENTER_YOUR_WEBSITE_URL” (there are four occurrences) with your website URL, and then paste the code into your website. It’s best to place it in your footer – it helps loading time.

Traffic

Guest Posts

Being a guest author on blogs will help generate massive traffic.

To fix the problem directly, gaining more traffic will always help your Alexa Rank. The best way to gain traffic for most people is via guest blogging.

Whether you submit one, two, three, or ten articles a week to guest blogs, they all will help you significantly.

Not only do you gain the increase in reach from the new visits, but you will gain a higher amount of pageviews since the traffic is targeted.

Luckily, guest blogging is extremely simple to do, and generally will have a large reoccurring payoff.

Blog Commenting

Of all of the ways to generate traffic, blog commenting is by far my favorite, and is one of the easiest to do in your spare time.

Once you get into a good groove and have a solid strategy ahead of you, blog commenting can send boats of traffic to your website.

SEO

SEO is a great long-term traffic machine that will help you out greatly in raising your Alexa score. Best of all, it is incredibly simple like the before-mentioned methods.

Blog commenting, guest posting, and SEO all go hand-in-hand for one reason – blog commenting and guest posting build relevance, credibility, and backlinks for your website.

As you progress, search engines will learn to respect your website more and more and place your website higher in search results.

How Do You Improve Your Alexa?

Photo Credit: Thumbnail | Reaching | Speeding Traffic | Talking Guy