Alexa Ranking and Your Blog

Alexa Ranking: A Simple Start to Increasing Your Blog's Profitability.

Lately, I've been looking more into something called an Alexa Ranking.  Your Alexa Ranking is a very important tool that advertisers use to gauge the profitability of your blog. The lower the ranking, the more attractive your blog is to them and the more money you will earn from advertising. The lower your Alexa number the better. Low=good.
 

One thing an Alexa ranking is not, is a popularity contest. Well it is and it isn't. I'll explain.
One of the main ways Alexa ranks you is through a toolbar that is installed in some of your visitor's browsers. So, when they visit your site the information is sent back to Alexa. The more visitors the lower your score.   This is why I say that it's not a popularity contest. If you have several thousands of people visit your site a day and only 100 of them have an Alexa toolbar installed, then only the one hundred count. So say another blog has only 600 page views a day and 300 of those visitors have the Alexa toolbar, their blog will have an advantage over yours.  From what I've read, the toolbar is the most important and easiest way to increase your rating.

The good news is that it's not the only way they rank you.  One of the other ways they rank you is by sites that have backlinks to your site. The higher ranking the site, the more the impact. Increase your backlinks by commenting more and guest posting on other blogs. A lot of bloggers have said they were able to quickly increase their Alexa ranking by guest posting.

 Of course the links have to be the right kind or they will not be crawled and indexed. You need dofollow links as opposed to nofollow links.

Dofollow links are links search engine crawlers can crawl and helps to increase your SEO and Alexa rating. Nofollow links can not be crawled and are ignored. Nofollow links are still important because they are good to refer others to your site and can bring you traffic that way. Also, they are saying now that it's important to have a good mix of both types of links for SEO.  By default, Blogger's commenting system is nofollow but when you put a link in a post on Blogger it is a dofollow by default.

You can learn how to make your Blogger commenting system into dofollow by reading this tutorial at All Tech Buzz.
 
However, CommentLuv and Disqus commenting systems have dofollow linking and for this reason they come with a headache of receiving a lot of spam comments because people are trying to get backlinks to increase their rating. Of course you can look at it as more traffic for your site because you will have a more attractive commenting system. I’ll go more into this in another post.

To find your Alexa ranking simply go to Alexa.com and type in your blog address.  There you can find your rating as well as what sites backlink to you. By downloading the toolbar you will be able to keep track of your Alexa Rating in your browser. Downloading the browser is said to help your rating as well, of course, as the other blogs you visit. Mine lowered significantly after downloading the toolbar. Be aware that you will be able to see every Alexa rating of every blog you visit when installing the toolbar, which is interesting!

Writing a post about Alexa and linking back to their site is also said to help increase your rating. Not to mention the more people that post about it the more people that may download the toolbar, and the more accurate Alexa will be in rating you, not to mention the faster your rating will improve.

I’m not an expert by any means on Alexa ratings or SEO but I will write more posts as I learn and share here. So stay tuned for more tips coming soon!

Linking up Here.