How I Got My Alexa Rank in the Top Million

Jul 22, 2010 by mandeewidrick

First of all, many of you may have absolutely no idea what an Alexa rank is or what it does. I grabbed a bit of history from Wikipedia to educate you:

Alexa Internet was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat. The company’s name was chosen in homage to the Library of Alexandria, drawing a parallel between the largest repository of knowledge in the ancient world to the potential of the Internet.

The company offered a toolbar that gave Internet users suggestions on where to go next, based on the traffic patterns of its user community. Alexa also offered context for each site visited: to whom it was registered, how many pages it had, how many other sites pointed to it, and how frequently it was updated.

Alexa’s operation includes archiving of webpages as they are crawled. This database served as the basis for the creation of the Internet Archive accessible through the Wayback Machine. In 1998 the company donated a copy of the archive, 2 terabytes in size, to the Library of Congress. Alexa continues to supply the Internet Archive with web crawls.

In 1999, Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com for about $250 million in Amazon stock as the company moved away from its original vision of providing an ‘intelligent’ search engine. Alexa began a partnership with Google in spring 2002, and with the Open Directory Project in January 2003. In May 2006, Amazon replaced Google with Live Search as a provider of search results. In September 2006, they began using their own Search Platform to serve results. In December 2006, they released Alexa Image Search. Built in-house, it is the first major application to be built on their Web Platform. Excerpt from Wikipedia

So that gives you a little history about Alexa, but the real question going through your mind is, “What can it do for me?”

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on a value derived from these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter. -Excerpt from Alexa.com

Being an internet marketer, I was hearing a TON about Alexa and the need for my website to be ranked in the top million. At the time, I didn’t know what Alexa was, but I found my answers (above) and immediately started looking for ways to improve my rank. Less than 2 months ago, my site was ranked higher than 4 million, which meant I needed to attempt to drop that number to less than 1 million. The game was on.

I blogged almost daily, adding keywords to my blog posts via the WP All in One SEO plugin (thanks to Chuck Bartok for alerting me to that one!). My rank started improving immediately. I also joined a syndication tribe to drive new traffic to my site.

And that’s all I did.

Alright, so I also followed a few of the tips shared on this blog post from Dosh Dosh, but for the most part everything I did was extremely simple. If I’d spent more time on it, my ranking would’ve improved even faster. That’s a fun thought.

We are now in late July, and my ranking as of today sits at 986, 743. Woo hoo!

Are you familiar with Alexa ranks? How did you improve yours?