Alexa ranking - What it is and why it matters

Most people in the internet marketing business and in particularly with websites writing blogs know about the concept of Alexa ranking, but what exactly is this magical number that seems to be so important to websites and just how important is a good Alexa rank really?

Alexa ranking ranks very differently than search engine rankings like Google. The main difference is the fact that Alexa only calculates the traffic of visitors who have installed the Alexa toolbar when calculating their ranking, so if your site has a niche where most visitors do not have the Alexa toolbar installed it can be tricky to get your Alexa ranking improved. This partly undermines the importance of Alexa ranking as it is mostly other websites and businesses who have the toolbar installed, while most ordinary people who do not own a website or deal with internet marketing don’t have an Alexa toolbar installed on the browser. Nevertheless, Alexa ranking is an important tool to determine how much traffic a website is getting, and especially important when comparing the rank to the ranking of other websites working on the same niche.

A good Alexa ranking is considered to be if a website is in the top 100,000, but a ranking in the top 200,000 isn’t considered bad either since this means that your website is in the top 1% of the websites in the world. Being in that range generally means that the website will attract more advertisers and prominent websites wanting to work with you.

The big challenge websites are faced with is how to improve this Alexa ranking. One of the ways is the same way that a website improves its search engine ranking; by doing good SEO. This gets your website higher up on google which sends more traffic to the website. A more direct way to improve your Alexa ranking however is by constantly updating it and making it a lively non-static site, like this blog is doing for VIPaffiliates. Alexa recognizes this and rewards active sites with better rankings. Lastly, promote yourself on social media. Write, blog, advertise on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ so people will be aware of your website and create lots of traffic.

Follow these 3 advises and your Alexa rank will improve in no time hopefully attracting lots of advertisers and even more users.