Blazing Minds

Cindy
Twitter: z3olyte
says:

good observation, Karen.. I didn’t know the alexa chrome extension can increase site rank even if I’m the only one surfing. I’ve been a long time Firefox user but since Chrome was introduced to me, I never switched back.. everything loads fast even with a few extensions.
Cindy recently posted..Live Video Broadcast on your Blog with Justintv and Wibiya

PaulOdtaa
Twitter: begintoblog
says:

Hi Karen

I am also a fan of Chrome it is a lot faster and I like the way I can just type in a query in the title bar and I’m quickly taken to the search. I do however make extensive use of Firefox with its million and one plug-ins for techie stuff and screen grabs.

Thanks for the information of the Chrome Alexa widget.

As there is some confusion by some of your commentators on Alexa I like to make a few points.

Alexa’s rating system is, as you say, dependent on the visitors having an Alexa widget or toolbar to be counted. This is also why Alexa can provide an analysis of users, which can be helpful to advertisers etc.

Alexa is an important factor in improving the website’s income. Some advertisers, particularly, TextLinkAds, will value their rate dependant on the Alexa rating. As they a fixed monthly fee they are a good way of boosting your monthly wage.

Alexa is biased towards technical people, gadget freaks and those interested in SEO. Trying to avoid stereotypes, but I can’t, the majority of those with Alexa widgets are male. Of course there are a few savvy women in the Alexa fold as well.

As a consequence there is a large segment of the internet world missed by Alexa. In particular those orientated towards female interests.

Going on the ratings

The rating itself is based on the number of hits on a website, by those with an Alexa toolbar widget. The hits can be improved by putting a small Alexa counter in the sidebar, which I have done. Then the counting is done from the number of actual visitors, whether they have an Alexa widget or not.

The number of hits are then counted up by Alexa and the site with the most number of hits is 1, the second number of hits 2 down to one of my dormant site with an Alexa rating of ten million. I’m reckoning ti will only need a couple of visits with my new, enhanced Chrome browser to make it jump a couple of million places.

Bear in mind that in the high ratings there are a lot of inactive websites, dead blogs or sites, such as a church group, which will not have many visitors that are that interested in technology. Therefore you should be able to jump past them very quickly.

Where a site has a very high number rating then it requires very few visits to drastically reduce the numbers. On my website, Beginning to Blog, which I launched on January 2nd, (I don’t know why, but I had a bit of a headache on January 1st), I’ve managed to pull the Alexa rating down from 4.1 million to 1.7 million. This is with visitor numbers increasing from around two a day to about fifteen. So not exactly an overwhelming number.

Quite a few successful blogs with a Google page ranking of 4 still seem to have an Alexa rating of just over a million. So assume that it is harder to reduce your rating as you move into a more competitive market.

I suspect that Alexa is more accurate the lower your rating. I note they give a far more detailed analysis of websites that are rated below the 100,000 mark. I suspect this is because they know the statistics are far more accurate.

How to improve the Alexa rating.

Write about Alexa – the people you attract to your site are almost certainly to have the little widget.

Write about Alexa elsewhere, such as a free article directory, with backlinks to your site.

What if your site is not technical? I advised a poetry website to write a page, not a post, about their technical development. Not to display it, but to have a link in their about page. From this they improved traffic and were able to make a little extra cash from affiliate links to their premium theme provider.