I now have an Alexa Rank - one goal down!

It’s been three weeks since I set myself the challenge of increasing my Alexa Rank.

It was an easy enough challenge as a) I had 0 rankings and b) Alexa has a solution for that.

I’m happy to report that my page rank has increased from no ranking to 18,174,655.

A tip about Alexa numbers: The higher the number, the less traffic your site is getting. Google has a global rank of 29, which means they are obviously doing better than me because they get a LOT of traffic. The fact that I do have a number is AWESOME! And it only took three weeks.

I’m also getting an average of four unique visitors per day according to Alexa, which meets another objective: to increase my visitor traffic from 10 per week. I’ve not yet ranked for the UK as most of my traffic seems to come from the US, but there’s time. I’m not just relying on Alexa for my site analytics but that’s another blog post for another day.

How to get ranked by Alexa

To get ranked quickly by Alexa you first need to register with them and confirm ownership of your domain by adding a Meta tag to your page. If you are using WordPress there is a helpful little plugin or you can upload an HTML file to your server.

Your Alexa Rank is calculated using the Alexa Toolbar so go ahead and add one to your browser. Alexa uses the browsing data from people using the Toolbar and calculates the traffic ranking of each site.

Many websites encourage visitors to download an Alexa toolbar. It’s also useful for scoping out the ranking of the competition and of course sites you want to get backlinks from.

Get social

Of course, in order to have a rank, you need to have visitors so I’ve been socialising. I haven’t tweeted that much but I did comment on three very interesting blogs. I think my biggest return has been my use of Pinterest. Social media and Pinterest is also something I’ll be looking at in more detail.

I still have miles to go before I sleep but I consider this to be a good start.

Why should you care about Alexa Rank?

Alexa depends on people using their toolbar to rank sites so don’t get obsessed about your rank if you don’t have the kind of site whose users would install the toolbar. That being said, if you are blogging to make money from advertising then a high Alexa Rank (low numbers remember) tells potential advertisers how much traffic your blog gets. Many advertisers rely on an Alex Rank as proof, as Alexa is independent and impartial, so go ahead and get amongst it!