As you may recall in my last post I said I would be posting some tips to help you improve your Alexa rank. I found quite a few tips, here are the beter sounding tips I found that may help you improve your Alexa rank. If you would like to know more about what Alexa rank is and how it works, please see my Improve Your Alexa Rank Challenge (Part 1) post.

Top 10 Tips (In no particular order)

1. Install the Alexa Toolbar – Seeing as Alexa rank is based on how many people visit your site per day, who have the toolbar installed. Install “Sparky” The Alexa Toolbar for Firefox today! Alternatively you could install another firefox plugin, which also exchanges data with Alexa – Search Status.

2. Install the Alexa Site Widget on your blog/site – The reason you want to do this is simple,  you want as many people to download the Alexa Toolbar as possible. So by installing the Alexa Site Widget on your blog, you are more likely to get people interested in Alexa rank, and if they have a website they’ll most likely download the toolbar. Even if they don’t have a website, they might find it interesting and install it anyway?

Here’s an example of what the Alexa Site Widget looks like:

3. Encourage others to install the Alexa Toolbar – This is a pretty obvious one, and you will probably have already noticed me doing this. So encourage everyone you know to install it, friends, family, work collegues, your nexdoor neighbours, the milkman … Everyone!!

4. Bookmark every post you make, and encourage others to bookmark your posts too – We all know bookmarking your posts is a great way to get lots of backlinks to your site, but it can also help you get lots of traffic too if done properly. For this to work you will need to do some research to find out what the hottest topics are in your niche, and then write very informative content answering the most popular questions. Use tip 5 to help get some exposure to these posts.

5. Visit Webmaster and Internet Marketing forums – On these type of forums the majority of people will have the Alexa toolbar installed, all you have to do is get them to your site. The best way to do this is to use your forum signature to link to popular posts on your blog, preferably offering free tips to improve Alexa rank. Or link to a post that answers a much asked question.  You can also try and offer them something of value for free, and experiment with different subject lines in your text link.

6. Make an ‘Alexa rank’ category – Register with Alexa.com and opt-in to receive occasional news emails from them, and blog about the latest Alexa news as soon as you get it. It would also be a good idea to create regular posts with more Alexa rank tips as you find them. Also be sure to do keyword research, and submit your posts to Article directories and link back to your Alexa rank category.

7. Blog about, or write and submit articles about Alexa – If you write about Alexa often enough, and do a little keyword research you are more likely to get found by people searching for information on Alexa. These people will more than likely have the Alexa Toolbar installed, which means when they pay you a visit, your Alexa rank will improve. If you are submitting articles about Alexa, make sure you give a good enough reason for them to visit your site in the resource box.

Example: “Find out how Paul improved his Alexa Site Rank by 1 million in 30 days.”

8. Talk about Alexa rank on social networks – Use sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Youtube to get people interested in the Alexa  and how it works. When doing this post a snippet of the post, and give it an interesting subject line. And always include a link back to your site, to a relevant post. Of course you can do this with any subject matter, but for this we want people to get interested in Alexa and installing the toolbar, so a post about Alexa is needed.

9. Create a Webmaster Tools Section/page – The trick here is to attract Webmasters to a page on your site, where they can gain access and information to the latest and greatest Webmaster tools. If your page is good enough it will get bookmarked, linked to, social bookmarked, etc…

10. Join communities like MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog - Sign up for these blog community sites and add your site link to your profile, next install the site widget. You can see an example of one of these site widgets on my sidebar to the right. Doing this and various other things to do with these sites has almost doubled my traffic. I haven’t got a BlogCatalog account yet, but I will be signing up this week and putting the widget under the MyBlogLog widget.

For more Alexa rank tips check this post out from DoshDosh.com – 20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank, it is the post where I got most of my Alexa Traffic tips ideas from.

I will be making another post probably later this week, where I will be sharing what I’ve been doing with these blog community sites to increase my traffic… Stay tuned.

In the mean time amougst other things, I will be trying out some of these tips to improve my Alexa rank. I’ll be posting another update of my Alexa rank on Friday, hopefully I will have hit my 500,000 target by then after only 2 weeks!

I’ll try and get the blog community traffic tips post up by this Wednesday.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this post, please leave a comment and tell me what you think?

Paul.

P.S.

I messed my blog settings up last night and spent about an hour  reseting everything, so I decided to change the header as you’ve probably noticed… What do you think of it? I’ve done it for a bit of fun, and it makes me smile when I see it.

I will most likely be getting a professional header graphic made in the next couple of months. I’ll most likely have a play around in Photoshop in my spare time first though, even though my mentor, Alex Jeffreys doesn’t recommend it. As long as you do things like that in your spare time, and not when you should be working on something, I think it’s fine.

Well it’s just over a week ago now since I set my goal of getting  my Alexa rank down to 500,000 or below, and I’ve seen a big improvement in that time. Much more than I expected for the little work I’ve put into it.

If you check my last post I posted a screen shot which was taken on 17th September 2009, which was just over 1 week ago. And my Alexa rank was 908,199.

Here is my latest screen shot taken just moments ago:

It’s now 656,630 !!!.. I’m quite amazed at this, I really didn’t expect it to come down that fast. At this rate I should smash the 500,000 goal easy, unless it starts to slow now for some reason?

Funny thing is, I can honestly say that I haven’t really been doing anything much in the last week to try and get it down either! I have actually been feeling down all week, I suffer with recurrent mouth ulcers and I’ve had them pretty much the whole of September. It all started when I bit my lip, and it’s gone on from there and now I’m just getting rid of one on my tongue.

And don’t know if you’ve ever had a mouth ulcer, most people will have had one of these awful things at some point in their life, but they’ve got to be one of the most depressing and painful things I’ve ever had to endure. And I get these things several times a year!

Anyway enough about that!

The point is, all I have done this week is comment on a few peoples blogs, done a little networking on Facebook,  and added a few people on MyBlogLog. That is all I have done in the last 7 days to try and generate traffic. So just goes to show how well these methods must work.

I’ve also managed to find some good looking tips that I plan to use, and you can too, to help us with our Alexa rankings. I will go over these tips/methods in another post on Monday. I would include it in this post but it will be better for SEO if I make a separate post with a targeted keyword phrase in the title.

So try and pop back over sometime next week, and the post should be there where I’ll share these tips with you.

Thanks for reading.

Paul.

P.S.

Remember, if you want to improve your own Alexa rank, the best thing you can do is install the Alexa Toolbar. Just visiting your own site daily with it installed, will help with your Alexa ranking.

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!!

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.