A couple of weeks ago I read a post on Rob Canyon’s blog about the Alexa Toolbar plugin for firefox, and how he had installed it and watched his rank increase. So I installed “Sparky” the Alexa Toolbar and I found my Alexa rank to be around 1,300,000. I didn’t take a screen shot of it at the time, but I wish I did now just to show as a bit of proof for this post.

So today I thought I better take a screenshot of my current  Alexa rank, which is 908,199. So in around 2-3 weeks I’ve managed to improve my Alexa rank by nearly 400,000!!

Alexa Ranking - Paul-Lear.com 17th September 2009

Now I’ve noticed for some reason the Alexa Toolbar doesn’t seem to give the same rank as at Alexa.com, it seems to be a day behind. I think Alexa updates you rank every 24 hours, and then the toolbar is updated with the previous days ranks? So I’m not really sure why it can’t show the same result as at Alexa.com, but there you go. If you want to know the exact rank of a site you need to visit Alexa.com to find out.

The good thing about the Alexa Toolbar is, if you click on the traffic rank shown it will take you straight to that sites page on Alexa.com. So it’s not too bad.

So how have a managed to get my Alexa rank down?

Well I’m not entirely sure, but I think it’s probably something to with the amount of other students who also have the Alexa Toolbar installed. You see your Alexa rank is determined by the amount of people who visit your site, who also have the Alexa Toolbar installed. There are some other sources they use to rank you which they don’t mention, but the data received by Alexa from the people who have their toolbar installed, is the main thing that is used to give us our Alexa ranking.

It will also most likely be something to do with the fact that I have the Alexa Toolbar installed now, and I visit my blog daily.

Another reason that may have helped, is I have the Yahoo My BlogLog widget installed. I think people like to get exposure by having their face on as many blogs with this widget as possible at all times. Or at least that’s one of the things I like to do. :)

I have also been doing a lot more blog commenting than usual, although I still don’t think I’m doing enough, I think this has helped my rank increase because many of the people who’s blogs I’ve commented on, have visited my blog in return and some, quite a few actually, have even left me a comment in return for commenting on their blog, which is always nice. :)

If you would like to find out more, click on the following text to see exactly how the Alexa traffic rank is determined

So for the next 2 weeks or so, I’m going to work on getting my Alexa rank down even more. In fact I’m going to set myself a little challenge, I want to see if I can get my rank down to 500,000 within the next 3 weeks. So lets see how I go and I’ll make another post in 3 weeks from now with my results. And I will also be making a few posts in-between as updates on my progress and what I’ve been doing, and with some tips on what I’ve learnt.

I would also recommend you also install the Alexa Toolbar to help improve your sites Alexa rank, and also so you can follow my progress and see if I’m on track to hit the 500,000 mark. Not to mention it’s also fun to find out the Alexa rank of each site you visit, and see if you are higher than them. Of course it would also help me with my challenge if you were to then revisit my site with the toolbar installed. ;)

I also like to seek out blogs with higher traffic ranks than myself in an effort to try and improve my ranking. I’m not sure if it works, but the higher the Alexa rank for a site, the more traffic they are getting. Which also equals more exposure for your comment and more chance someone will click your link to find out more about you.

So in this period of time I’m going to be experimenting with lots of different methods, as well as the methods I’ve already been using and trying to figure out what works. I will update you with my findings on this when I post my results of this challenge. I will also be blogging a lot more in this time too, as more content should equal more visitors.

Challenge yourself to improve your own Alexa rank

Why not set yourself  a challenge to improve your own Alexa rank. I think it would be much more fun if a few people do it at the same time, and we all blog about it, and visit each others blogs daily to help improve our ranks. What do you think?

If you are going to be doing this too, then please leave a comment on this post letting me know, I will then help you by paying your blog a daily visit for the next 3 weeks. And I would hope you would do the same for me, but no worries if you can’t, I will still help you out.

Until next time…

Paul.

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Filed under: Alexa Rank Tips • Traffic

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