We all know that the Alexa ranking isn’t very important, but it still serves its purpose in advertising in sites like TLA that rate you higher based on your Alexa ranking. TLA isn’t the only one that uses Alexa ranking as a factor in your site’s importance but it is one of the major services that does. Having a higher Alexa ranking doesn’t mean you will get more traffic but it does indicate how much traffic based on an algorithm that Amazon has come up with. Granted the big complaint about Alexa is that only web savvy people are helping your rankings so the numbers can be misleading. The only way that Alexa gets traffic results back is if you have their toolbar installed.

If you don’t have the Alexa toolbar, download it now

The Alexa toolbar just recently officially became available on Firefox. Previously there were a few hacks to get it to work on Firefox and was only otherwise available on IE for Windows. Now that Alexa is available on Firefox in the form of Sparky you can better use the Alexa rankings to understand your traffic as long as you have a very web savvy audience that visits your site.

There are other benefits to having Sparky installed on Firefox, you can easily see traffic trends for any web site and determine their importance very generally by looking at the extension that is place in your status bar.

Other ways to improve your ranking without the toolbar

There are javascript applets that you can install on your site that will count as a unique hit and report it back to Alexa every time your site is visited. This can ensure that you are getting a much more accurate estimation on your Alexa ranking based on your web site traffic. This, however inconvient, can help to improve the overall Alexa ranking system if done by a lot of people.

The javascript applet that you install on your site does display information about your Alexa ranking. Some would rather not display this information publicly or don’t want to sacrifice their design by putting some banner on their site. You can easily avoid this issue by putting the javascript in a div and use visibility:hidden to ensure that the javascript is still loading just fine but it just can’t be seen with CSS enabled.

Improve your Alexa ranking the Blackhat way

There are other less scrupulous ways to improve your Alexa ranking that I don’t personally approve of but are widely used and can benefit you temporarily. These methods are known as auto-surfers and there are several services that offer varying versions of the idea. One of the more popular methods is to work on a credit-based system. So the more sites within the network you visit per day the more credits you earn.

There are other sites that allow you to simply “buy” visits from them for people that have the Alexa toolbar installed. Neither of these ways are legitimate ways to improve your Alexa ranking and are only temporary and must be done frequently to make it “work.”

Content is king even with Alexa Rankings

The best way to ensure that you aren’t faking your Alexa ranking is to develop content that makes people want to visit your site and come back later. This will generate more traffic and make your site more popular through interest. So no matter what ranking system is fluctuating or your site gets rated importance by as long as you can keep new visitors coming and seasoned visitors interested you are going to have a successul web site that will surely rank high through any test.

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