Oct 29 2007
Increase Alexa Rank
There are a number of different ways you can go about increasing your Alexa rank, but I have noticed significant changes by doing one of a few things. Alexa rank, among a few other things, is one of the more important tools when determining the traffic of a blog. I have read a variety of different things as to how the Alexa rank is determined, and I can personally comment on what I believe is true. Like PageRank, Alexa is a great way to increase the exposure and traffic to your blog.
How Do You Do It?
If you have not yet noticed, I placed a little Alexa widget in the footer of my blog.
As I explained earlier, one of the ways that Alexa rank is determined (and increased), is by the number of Alexa toolbar users who view the webpage per day. Like the widget, the toolbar actively shows you the rank of a webpage you are on. 
As you visit different webpages, the ranking updates and you can see how popular each page is.
Why Use The Widget?
As I said, the rank is determined by the number of visitors who visit your page each, while using the toolbar. However, if you place the widget somewhere within your blog, Alexa believes that every single person visiting your webpage has the toolbar running. By doing this, you are increasing your ranking exponentially at the beginning.
When I first added the widget a few weeks ago, my ranking was near 800,000. Now, it is less than half of that! Of course the “growth” (shrinkage if you are going by numbers) will flatten off until your traffic increases, but beyond that, it is a great way to get a boost to your Alexa ranking.
Additional Tidbits
Even if you do not care about increasing your rank, it is very interesting to see the ranks of other webpages. What the number generally means, is that there are (insert rank of page) websites that receive more traffic each day than the current one.
For instance, my rank of about 370,000 means that each day there are 369,999 webpages that receive more traffic than me. However, if you look at Google, there is only one page that has more traffic: Yahoo. John Chow is in the top 3000 trafficked websites, and even if you do not care about increasing your rank, the toolbar is a great way to quickly tell how much traffic a website actually does get.
If you notice someone claiming they get XX amount of traffic each day, but see their Alexa ranking up in the 1,000,000 plus range, I would definitely seek more information about their traffic reports. Use of the toolbar extends beyond the basic spectating of ranks, but can be used as a valuable tool to help benefit you as a consumer.
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I use the toolbar, but I did not know about the widget. I will also add it to my blog.
Incidentally, how can you get traffic from alexa, I mean, just why is it important to be ranked high? Off course, the more traffic the higher your rank, but that is just a number. If your pagerank increase, you show up higher in the results and thus get more visitors.
I never understood the elexa thing.
Well the main reason I think it helps, is when you view someone’s website and see that they have a low (meaning high traffic) ranking, you subconsciously believe they have credibility. After all, who wants to read material from a source that is not credible. Also, it is impressive to some people when they explain Alexa ranking. For instance, take a look at some of the bigger bloggers (Chow, Shoemoney, etc) and you will notice they are ranked inside the top 3000 trafficked websites. That in itself is definitely impressive and can help draw more traffic.