I saw a guest post on Problogger the other week in which some one was giving advice on how to increase Alexa (The ranking system which claims to show how popular a site is compared to all the other websites in the world) ranking  by 2 million places in just over 2 months. I immediately thought, ‘ I did better than that’. Not to say it wasn’t a well written article, it was, but I thought yeah power to you for doing that, but it can actually be done to better effect. 11 weeks ago I published my first post with no mailing list and no social media presence and after a week or so I finally got recognised by Alexa at 8,500,000, today I am ranked 83,482 (28,000 in the US)

  • Comment

This site receives about 50-70 comments a day on average, I put that down to the amount I comment on other sites and down the the commentluv plugin. Commentluv (the plugin that allows readers to leave a link of their latest post under their comment) went offline for a day recently and my traffic dropped a bit. Not a lot, but enough to notice and I put that down to commentluv not working right across the internet. Conclusive proof (in my eyes) that commenting does work.

I’m always banging on about why you need to contribute (not spam comment) to other sites whether they are in your market place or not. Prime example of this is Eric. Eric only found my site a few weeks ago, but has left 72 comments so far on this site. That’s just here, he can be seen everywhere, that tactic has seen his site grow from nothing to rocketing up the ranks with a one month average of 315,000. Ben is the same, 100 comments here and he too can be seen everywhere and has improved his site ranking, which is only two months old by the same amount!

  • Following

Having a strong following is one of the major components. If you are not loyal to your readers, they will never be loyal to you. Loyal followers means they will spread your content for you and contribute when they feel they can add value.Your social media following is important too, I use twitter a lot, but I also help a lot of people on their too with @’s and DM’s. Look after your readers, you need them.

I maintain a ‘reply to everything’ policy, is the best way to increase your traffic and ranking. If you can demonstrate time and again, that they come first and you will help and listen without an agenda, you will rocket up the ranks no problem.

Matthew over at BigRedTomatoCompany said by using the tactics I talk about, increased his traffic by 40%

  • SEO

I ignored SEO when I started this site. Huge mistake and was done out of pure ignorance, I didn’t understand it and was getting great results from the social media angle. Truth is, I still don’t fully understand it, but I’m learning all the time and now search engine traffic is bringing in around 20% of my daily visitors. Ideally I want this up to around 80-90%. It does take a bit of time (from what I understand) for the search engines to start liking your juice.

I have found links outbound and inbound on this site have helped massively, as have the post titles. I’ve still not found hard concrete evidence from Google and the likes, that links in comments (like commentluv) help with page rank etc, but I expect I will learn more along the way.

Ideally you want google and yahoo and all the others to be providing most of your traffic because it’s a fantastic addition in which you don’t really have to do a lot more for.

  • Tips

As I said early, It took around a week for Alexa to start holding data on the site. I read in a forum that if I added a alexa toolbar in my browser it would help get recognised quicker, it did. 3 days after doing this, I was ranked at 8,500,000, 11 weeks later it ranked over 8 million places higher!

Registering is another good way, register your site with them on their site, I have heard of instances that this got people ranked quicker who were previously not ranked at all.

Alexa do their own widget too, like mine on the left had side. No evidence to say this helps, but DragonBlogger has done a experiment on this and he concluded that it does help.

  • Quantity

I’m not going to say the more you post the better your ranking will be, for me yes, it’s clearly the case, but every site is different as are the readers. Experiment with it though, try posting once a day for a week or even ten times a week to see if it does make a difference. I went almost a week only posting once a day earlier in the month and my traffic dropped, so I put it straight back up to twice a day minimum.

Super Hornet Fires Off USS Abraham Lincoln Flight Deck
Creative Commons License photo credit: DVIDSHUB

  • Caveat

Alexa isn’t the be all and end all of a website. In fact it doesn’t actually matter very much at all, I know a lot of well respected web site owners who don’t care about their ranking. To go even further, Alexa admits, it’s not 100% accurate, it can only track the popularity of a website based on how many people who have their search toolbar installed in their browser, look at your site. I have yet to come across a system that is totally accurate and that includes Google Analytics, but it’s a fun way of seeing how you measure up against others.

Alexa does say that once a site is in the top 1% (100,000 or higher) the tracking becomes more accurate, but like I said, it’s a bit of fun, not to be taken seriously. I keep a track of mine daily, but I like the feeling of thinking ‘where am I placed today’.

So as I said, if you are interested in increasing your alexa ranking then do it the way I did it.

What does everyone think?

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