Alexa ranking : is it Important ? How to improve it ?

I was looking in seo forums about ways of improving my Alexa rank, I was stunned when I found seo people aren't interested in that rank. I read answers like "what would you need that for? It's not that accurate so it's just silly to do anything about it." but there are more than one reason to prove that Alexa rank is important.

Why is it important ?
I was frustrated to get kicked from Review me and Text ads links for lack of alexa rank!! May be I submitted my blog a bit too early in such affiliate programs. The moral of the story here is alexa rank is used to measure the value of advertising on your website. Look at this picture. Text ads link use alexa rank to sort blogs to the advertiser. So let us take it for granted now : you have to improve your Alexa rank !!


How does Alexa work ?
It's controversial. Everybody is criticizing alexa's way to rank websites. In fact, it's based on the number of visitors that surf on a certain domain using the alexa toolbar ! As we can see here, Website dealing with webmastering and have a great web savvy audience are more likely to get better ranking because most of their visitors use this bar. The main idea here is that alexa ranking can't be accurate, but as webmasters we have to deal with it.


How to improve my alexa rank ??
If you have one visitor per day. You have to make Alexa know abour him when he open your page!! So you have to :

Sensitize your audience about the importance of alexa rank by writing articles about its importance and ways of improving alexa rank.

Urge your visitors to setup alexa's toolbar: It's efficient , try to put a download link of the alexa's firefox add on you website. If you succeed to convince most of your readers to install this bar you'll see how your rank will grow up rapidly.

Put alexa rank widget in your website : don't be ashamed if your rank is way too far. putting this widget is important because everytime your page will load the widget will ping your domain into the alexa rank counter and that will make them feel that you have visitors.

Set up alexa navigation bar in every computer that comes on your hand. then bookmark your website as the home page. specially in cyber cafés . I know it sounds silly but it works. Maybe your URL will hang on as home page for days before somebody would change it.

Finally, be patient, as your traffic grows your alexa rank will boost rapidly in first millions but once you hit the top 100k the competition gets a bit more difficult. let's say it's an imperfect word, where such an inaccurate ranking tool would affect the monetizing of websites but we have to deal with that. The first step to take is to set up the navigation bar NOW !