You've got yourself a website and now you want to get lots of people to look at it. More importantly, your website is so brilliant that lots of people will look at it and you can sell advertising. But you've joined lots of advertising providers and you're getting nothing. Sound familiar? Read on.
Why IS Your Alexa Rank Important?
Advertisers and some advertising suppliers use the Alexa rank to help them determine the worth of your site. Some "pay-per-post" companies determine what they pay for your blog posts based on your Alexa ranking whilst some companies determine how much they will pay you for advertising based on your Alexa rank. When it comes to money in your pocket (or Paypal account), this is WHY it's important. Having said that, read on because you may not need to improve your Alexa rank at all.
There are three things that you need to consider:-
First Consideration
Now you firstly check your website's rank and see if it is quite pitiful. At this stage, I would recommend that you check your website's Alexa rank by visiting http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500 and typing your site's URL in the box just under the navigation bar, then click "Get Traffic Details" (if you can link to Alexa's site from here then use your right mouse button and select "open in new tab" or "open in new window" so you can come straight back here once you've seen your rank).
There are two ways to tell if it is pitiful:
firstly because the site won't show a graph of your actual traffic but will display a graph with a background text stating "Not In Top 100,000"- second, your traffic rank number is more than 1,000,000 (the lower the number the better)
At the moment, knowing that your Alexa is quite poor should be reason enough to start you sweating if you really want to make some money out of your site from advertising.
Second Consideration
Are you making enough money from your site? This will probably sound strange but if you are making enough money from your site then you won't need to bother with improving your Alexa rank. The trouble that you will have to go (unless you jump to step ??) is really not worth the effort because of the time it takes to actually improve your rank. You should only be trying to improve your rank if you need to make more money from your site from advertising that you sell on the site (if your site makes enough money without advertising don't bother with advertising - it is annoying to your viewer and may even may some of them go to a rival website).
Third Consideration
Is your business or level of trade for your business dependent upon the internet? If your website is merely an information website about your business but you don't trade from it or are not likely to trade from it then you don't need to improve your Alexa rank. For example, if you are a "Pound Shop" then you might want a website that gives information about your company and possibly your product range you are unlikely to want adverts on there so your Alexa rank is unimportant; on the other hand if you are a blogger looking to make money from your blog site then you will want to make sure your site is as valuable as possilbe and hence your Alexa rank needs to be as high as possible.
So now, you've looked at your Alexa rank and you've worked out it's not very good and you are not going to make very much from advertising. You now need to improve your rank considerably but how do you go about doing it? There are a few techniques that can help.
You've Decided You Definitely Want To Make Money From Adverts - How Do You Improve Your Alexa Rank?
Get The Alexa Toolbar
Ask your friends to download it as well and then both you and your friends should visit your website everyday. This won't make much of a dent in your rank, unless you have a fair few millions friends, but will help.
Install The Alexa Widget On Your Website
This isn't useful at first but every time your site is loaded it does tell Alexa that someone has visited your site. In the first instance, you might to place it on your site and then hide it by placing a graphic image over it. This isn't in the spirit of what Alexa intends but there again if you have a very poor traffic rank you really don't want to be advertising the fact that your rank is not very good!
Set All Your Links To Your Alexa Re-Direct
Do this for every page on your site, for example if your site (the mythical cheapfleas.co.uk for example) has a contact page, set the Alexa link for the page to http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?cheapfleas.com/contact.html.
This informs Alexa every time someone calls up your site and even if they go to your homepage by typing in the URL directly into the browser without using your Alexa re-direct then whenever they go to another page the redirect will kick in.
Join A Traffic Exchange
Join an automatic traffic exchange because otherwise you will need to sit there clicking which takes up valuable time. One of the better sites for this is UpMyRank which is a traffic exchange designed to help increase your Alexa rank. You will need to have Internet Explorer 7 and the Alexa toolbar installed. Then go to www.upmyrank.com and go through the sign in process. Once approved, you can run the exchange program on your computer. This exchange gives you a ratio of 1 hit to your site for every 4 that you visit (not the best, not the worst but it is free).
A tip here is, if you can, run the program on a separate computer or run it overnight, when you're away from the computer etc. It is impossible to do any work when this program is running even if you run it in minimised mode (keeps popping message up which makes you lose concentration).
I have tried other traffic exchanges, such as 24SevenHits and Traffic Temple which really don't deliver anything like they suggest - it takes a long time for them to deliver any hits at all to your site even you autosurf using them for 24 hours a day, seven days a week! They are not designed to specifically increase your Alexa rank and won't let you use your Alexa redirect URL. Unless the other people in the exchange have the Alexa toolbar installed, it really isn't going to make that much difference to your rank.
Buy Traffic
When looking at these sites, there are a few tips to ensure that you get value for money. Firstly, install a hit counter on your site and set it so that it only counts unique visits rather than page loads; this will tell you how effective any bought traffic program is. Secondly, check their prices - they mostly seem to be around the $30 per 1000 visits. If they are more or less than this then they are too expensive or too cheap (there is one exception, carry on reading) and hence are unlikely to deliver. Finally, make sure that they provide a timescale over which the hits will be delivered and that you check your website stats to ensure that they do.
The exception to the one being too cheap that I mentioned is one called "Just Hits". I came across this entirely by accident during my research as they don't advertise to the general public and tend to be a bit geeky. In fact, they are so geeky that they suggest that you install a hit counter and then order 50 hits free before you use them. Then, if you order hits from them they will give you an extra 50 hits free for every thousand that you order (if you order 1000 you get 1050, if you order 2000 you get 2100 etc). They charge £10 (10GBP) per thousand hits that you order and deliver them over 48 hours from the time they receive your payment. This is the best "buy traffic" deal that I have used. You can find them at www.freewebs.com/justhits
What Worked Best For Me
During my research I have tried a number of services. I experimented with a number of websites to see what would work most effectively. One site's rank jumped just under half a million places up the rank in just a week using the following techniques:-- putting the Alexa toolbar on my computer and getting about 100 friends to do the same
visiting the site every using the Alexa redirect URL and getting my friends to do the same
(these two alone made virtually no difference!)- used the service provided by Just Hits (I told them that I was researching for this article and asked if they would do it free but wouldn't!)
I have now used this for one my main sites and am continuing to use these techniques, buying 5,000 hits a weeks from Just Hits (this actually gives me 5,250 hits every week for just £50 which is well worth doing because I'm earning a lot more than this from advertising! If you want to quickly improve your rank then following this technique is well worth the money you need to spend because my site's rank is constantly increasing. Once it gets to where I want it, I will stop using this service and only use it again if the rank falls significantly.
What Was Mediocre For Me
- putting the Alexa toolbar on my computer and getting about 100 friends to do the
same
visiting the site every using the Alexa redirect URL and getting my
friends to do the same
(these two alone made virtually no difference!) - used the service provided by UpMyRank (it's free)
This made a small dent in my Alexa rank with it going up just over 500 places in a week. This is wholly free so no cash investment is required but it will take a lot longer for your rank to increase significantly but if you stick with it then your rank will increase over time.
What Failed Completely
- putting the Alexa toolbar on my computer and getting about 100 friends to do the same
visiting the site every using the Alexa redirect URL and getting my friends to do the same
(these two alone made virtually no difference!) - used a traffic exchange (in this case 24sevenhits)
In a week my rank hadn't changed at all. It hadn't gone up and it hadn't gone down. It just didn't move. In my opinion, it was a complete waste of time although when I joined another trraffic exchange (Traffic Temple) the rank for the site got worse rather than better!
What Is My Recommendation?
As always, I recommend that you do some research yourself. I'm not here to endorse any service but I have told you what has and hasn't worked for me. This may not be the case for you however if you are too busy or perhaps too lazy to undertake the research for yourself then I would suggest following the route that worked best for me. I have recommended this route to a friend who also tried it and found that his website's rank also improved.
A Word Of Caution
You should do any and all of the above before joining any advertising provider because you will probably find it is against their terms and conditions to use traffic exchanges etc. especially if you are being paid on a cost per impression basis (i.e. you get paid every time the advert is displayed!). You should only do this to improve your rank before you start selling adveritising in order to get the best price for your site. If you do continue to use these techniques to improve your rank whilst signed up to an advertising service then I would suggest that you create a special page that is advert free and use your Alexa redirect URL to direct to that page e.g., if you set up a page called hits.html at the mythical site called cheapfleas.com then make sure any Alexa ranking boosters refer to http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?cheapfleas.co.uk/hits.html
This means you will not be cheating your advertising service provider but you can still keep your rank value, and hence web or blog site value, high.
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