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.