CornerScribe

Improving your Alexa ranking

In less than 30 days I’ve moved my Alexa ranking from over 4 million to a little over 600,000. In this article, I’ll tell you how I did it.

First off, a quick reminder as to what an Alexa rank is, and why you should care. Alexa ranks are calculated via the Alexa toolbar. For everyone who has the toolbar installed, Alexa tracks her web surfing and calculates the popularity of web sites based on that.

Alexa ranks are used by many companies to sell advertising on your blog. One I use, text link ads, uses Alexa ranks as part of how they price and sell ad space on your site. If you’re interested, click the link above, and you’ll be directed to their site, and I’ll get a bonus for referring you.

If you think about it, there’s an obvious problem with Alexa rankings. Alexa counts only traffic for those people with the toolbar installed. You may have hundreds, even thousands, of visitors who don’t have it installed.

So, step one is to ask your readers to install the toolbar. You should install it yourself if you haven’t already. Once again, the link is Alexa toolbar download. It’s available for IE and Firefox.

Step two is to promote your blog. I’ve been participating in blog carnivals for a while, so that’s a good step to take if you haven’t already. If you aren’t familiar with carnivals, then read my post about it.

Another great way to promote is to participate in writing projects and contests on others’ blogs. I participated in two this month, Daily Blog Tips and EMoms at Home. You can read my entries here.

Daily Blog Tips: Three Essential Steps to Great Blog Posts

EMoms at Home: Write Outstanding Titles and Openings for your Blog

The one at Daily Blog Tips got an honorable mention, which wasn’t bad out of 115 entries. Both have generated quite a lot of extra traffic.

I recently spent a lot of time putting together character creation worksheets for those readers who write fiction. I’ve been a little disappointed in the amount of traffic it’s drawing, so I’m continuing to promote it. As a part of that, I leave notes on forums mentioning that it’s available. I’m also emailing other bloggers who I think might find it useful.

Step three, link to your own posts. Link to your own relevant posts, as I have in this post. Also, post an occasional list of your most popular posts. These interior links will often give even older posts new life.

I realize that an Alexa rank of 600,000 + doesn’t exactly make me an A-list blogger, but it’s a huge improvement, especially considering it took me less than 30 days to pull it off. The lesson I’ve learned? Spend more time promoting! No matter how much great content you’re writing, you still need to help people find it, and that’s where good promotion comes in.