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If you are doing paid reviews , selling text links or anything that is related to advertising and making money online then it is important to improve your Alexa rank. Although I have a decent Alexa rank ( around 130,000 ) I never gave much thought about actively trying to improve it. I really started to take some interest in it only after I joined Performancing Ads and started browsing there blog inventory. They HP Pavilion dv3 battery were listed according to the Alexa rank and my blog was way down. I checked out some paid review and link selling sites and Alexa rank was a considered in there pricing as well , so it is safe to say if you are interested in making money online you should give some thought to your Alexa rank.

What is Alexa rank and is it accurate ?

According to the Alexa website Alexa traffic rank is based upon three months historical data collected from Alexa toolbar users and other diverse traffic sources. Its not clear what this diverse traffic sources are but the Alexa toolbar usages is a big factor in your Alexa rank. Webmasters and Internet marketers are the ones who are most likely to have the toolbar installed so if your blog is related to web master tools , search engine optimization or Internet marketing your chance of getting a good Alexa rank is pretty high. Because of this bias towards the web master’s it isn’t a very reliable measure of a blog or web sites traffic but since most money making sites consider it as a metric you should work on improving it. Even the Alexa site says that it is not a very reliable metrics.

The traffic data are based on the set of tool bars that use Alexa data, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. To the extent that our sample of users differs from the set of all Internet users, our traffic estimates may over- or under-estimate the actual traffic to any particular site.- Alexa

How to improve your Alexa traffic ranking

The very first thing you have to do is install the Alexa toolbar. If you are an Internet Explorer user ( you really should switch to FireFox ) you have no option but to install the toolbar which I find bit bandwidth consuming. If you are a FireFox user then you can use the Searchstatus Firefox plugin which give you more information and functionality like highlighting nofollow links etc.

Adding an Alexa widget to your website – According to some, visitors need to click this to count as a visit but some say having the widget is enough ,  I did see a slight increase in my rank after adding the widget. Also if you have some decent Alexa rank showing it off can get some advertisement  deals as well.

Promoting your posts on Digg , Stumbleupon – Digg and Stumbleupon are two sites webmasters visit frequently so getting popular on them will get you some webmaster heavey traffic giving you a nice boost in your Alexa rank.

Frequent in webmaster forums – I guess its obvious that webmasters frequent webmaster forums. Actively participation in forums will give you some great Alexa friendly traffic.

There are many other ways including some shady methods to improve your Alexa ranking. 20 quick tips to improve your Alexa ranking have some additional methods mentioned in that post. While these methods will give you a slight boost in your Alexa traffic rank continuously producing good original content is the best way to keep improving your Alexa rank.

I will be submitting this post to the group writing project at Problogger. Its a great way to get some exposure , traffic and back links to your blog.