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While Alexa traffic rankings are not a perfect way of determining a web sites traffic they are still useful for comparing your site to a site to which you do not have access to the logs. Additionally services such as Text Link Ads, for example, determine the price of ads on your site using your Alexa rank. The higher your Alexa rank (the highest rank being 1), the more money you can make from the ads and it’s not just Text Link Ads that this applies to.

In short having a good Alexa ranking matters. So how do you go about ensuring a good ranking?

Install The Alexa Toolbar

If you install the Alexa toolbar on your own web browser, then every time you view your own site, you register as a hit with Alexa. If you are an Internet Explorer user you can download it here, Firefox users can install the SearchStatus Extension instead. If you are not using Firefox then you should for a better browsing experience.

Encourage Others To Use The Alexa toolbar

This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers, put a link the toolbars on your site.

Put An Alexa Rank Widget On Your Website

Alternately you can use the Alexa widgets which should enable Alexa to track even visitors without the toolbar installed. You can find out about the Alexa Widgets here:www.alexa.com/siteowners/widgets, they look like the one on http://forums.glassesadvisor.com


Use Alexa Redirects

Use Alexa Redirects on your website URL. For example: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://forums.glassesadvisor.com. Replace http://forums.glassesadvisor.comwith the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will only count each unique IP address once a day.

There are a number of other ideas suggested on the sites listed below, but many of them are related to driving traffic, which will certainly help your Alexa rank, but I’ve not listed them in this article as they are not Alexa specific tips. Although ultimately driving traffic to your site is what will give you the highest ranking, once Alexa is counting the visitors.