Using Alexa and Improving Alexa Rank
Creating and maintaining a website is a huge task to accomplish. Whether it be for personal reasons, a company, or advertising, many factors determine the success of your website. So you would want to develop strategies to make sure your website will be successful. Such as making your website appealing, having a successful SEO ranking to do well in search engines, and most importantly, your Alexa ranking. Most people focus on their SEO ranking, but many forget or don’t even know their website’s Alexa rank. So what is an Alexa ranking? In short, it is a ranking of how popular your website is on a global scale. But Alexa has other great tools and features to help you improve your website popularity and performance. So let’s jump right into Alexa, how to use its features, and how to improve your Alexa rank.
Alexa Search
Alexa Search further explained.
You may have heard the phrase “Alexa” from Amazon since it is their virtual assistant to help its users with their daily lives. This isn’t far off as the Alexa rankings are part of Alexa Search, which was created by Alexa Internet company, and is a subsidiary of Amazon. Hence they share names as the same company produced them, and they both help users for different purposes. The case of Alexa ranks was explicitly made for web developers to determine a website’s global popularity and help web developers improve their website. Since it’s hard to decide on the success of a website, the Alexa ranks help visualize how successful your website is on a global scale. The lower your Alexa rank is, the more popular your website is. So this is helpful to see how successful your website is and compare it to other websites.
How does Alexa Search get its data?
Now you might be wondering, how does Alexa Search get its data to rank websites? It gets its data by its taskbar called Alexa Toolbar. When you install Alexa Toolbar, it will monitor your browsing behavior which will be used as samples for internet users. With this Toolbar, you send your traffic data to a central server with your IP address and URL. Alexa also gathers data from thousands of browser extensions, widgets, and Alexa script sites installed with the Alexa Toolbar. These data will be referred to as the “global traffic panel,” which will also be used as a sample to represent internet users. Then with its data scientists, they help filter out spam and fake traffic to estimate a website’s total traffic. So rest assured that Alexa isn’t invading your privacy to get its data.
Alexa Rank
How is the Alexa Rank calculated?
We know how Alexa Search gets its data for the Alexa ranks, but how is it used to calculate the ranks? The Alexa ranks are determined by estimating a site’s traffic and visitor engagement over the last three months. Alexa Search will estimate how many unique and recurring visitors are coming onto your website. A frequent visitor visits the page more than once per day and will be counted as only one visit. Then it estimates how many unique visitors are coming to the website daily. Another essential parameter they use to calculate the ranks is seeing the average page views of a website by Alexa users. So finally, they use all this data to determine the ranks. You want to have the highest combination of traffic from unique visitors, page views, and engagement to get the highest rank.
Accuracy of Alexa Rank
Now knowing how Alexa rank is calculated, just how accurate are the rankings? The biggest issue with the Alexa rank would be the amount of data. Since they can only get data if users have the Alexa Toolbar or Alexa’s script installed. Alexa says they can not accurately rank websites with low traffic, especially with rankings beyond 100,000. So you will see fluctuations with websites with relatively low traffic, and it will be harder to draw meaningful conclusions. The reliability of a rank does increase once you pass beyond 100,00, but differences in traffic are much more significant at these rankings, so it will be harder to rank up. To get the most accurate rank, you can certify the metrics of your site by installing Alexa’s script on it. This way, Alexa can directly measure your website traffic and get better data for your rankings.
There is also a worrying issue that Alexa ranks could be manipulated. It was found that you could manipulate the Alexa ranks by creating a JavaScript function that opens an array of page addresses from your website, and it will increase your page views. However, Alexa data scientists can usually filter this manipulation, and this manipulation is only a short-term tactic. It won’t help someone’s website to grow and be successful.
Value of Alexa Rank
So with all this talk about Alexa Ranks, why is it essential for a website to succeed? The most significant value of the Alexa rank is comparing your website with your competitors. You can estimate how much traffic your competitors are getting and the audience overlaps between competitors. You can see what keywords and engagement draw your website and competitors. This can help you get new ideas to improve your website or take ideas from your competitors to get more viewers.
Another value of Alexa ranks is its optimization tools. The Alexa rankings it has website traffic analysis tools for your website. These tools are a great way to see where in the world people are coming to your website and how they got to your website. So you can optimize keywords and social engagement to get more traffic to your website. We will go more in-depth about these tools in a later section.
With the Alexa ranks, you can get high-quality partnerships and advertisements. Since the Alexa ranks determine a site’s popularity, you can use it to your advantage to advertise on popular websites. You can filter out websites with low traffic and analyze a website’s engagement and audience to help determine which website will help you promote. It will help you make better marketing decisions for the website to grow. These features make advertising significantly easier and determine partnerships that align with your website’s targeted audience.
Alexa Rank Features
Engagement
As mentioned previously, one of the Alexa rank features allows you to see the engagement of your website. These engagements help show what visitors are doing on your website and how they interact with other websites. Such as people coming to your website because of a particular topic or from a website referencing you. This can improve your SEO score to get further engagement as you will have a good amount of data on which websites are sending visitors to your websites and topics that made users click on your website. So you should be regularly checking up with your engagement on your website to see what’s drawing in users. This will allow you to know what’s popular for your website and will enable you to capitalize on that popularity to get more visitors or get rid of unsuccessful updates for your websites.
Keywords
The Alexa ranking keyword information tool dramatically enables you to write better content to make your website more noticeable and optimize your SEO score. A significant feature that Alexa ranks provide you with is keyword information. It gives what keywords people are searching for that get users to your website and suggests keywords. Such as keywords used by competitors, suggested keywords that you should use more, suitable keywords associated with topics, etc. All this information is at your disposal, provided by Alexa the rankings, to help better your traffic searches and SEO score. Since you can now write better content with better keywords to help draw in more visitors through search engines.
Increasing Alexa Rank
Content
You want to create good content so that more people will view your website. The best way to increase your Alexa rank is to create unique, reasonable, and relevant content. It may seem subjective, but with Alexa features, you can improve by making great content. Utilize its SEO suggestions and engagements to improve your content. Creating quality content will increase your traffic and thus rank higher in the Alexa ranks.
You also want it to be as relevant as possible by making quality content. Make sure to consistently update your website for new information or content so viewers can keep coming back. Consistent, relevant updates to your website will also improve your authority and trustworthiness. This makes it, so people will spread your website to get more traffic and more recurring visitors.
Lastly, your content needs to be unique content for your website. Instead, you shouldn’t be copying content and putting it into your website; rather, have your unique twist with your content. This will aid you in getting more people to share your website and thus more traffic to your website. It will make your website more exciting and engaging for visitors.
Inbound/Internal links
A great way to further increase your Alexa rank is to get related websites to link to your website. This is also known as inbound links, and if you have relevant websites that link to your website, it makes your website more visible to search engines. Having inbound links increases your visibility for search engines to get more traffic for your website, which will increase your Alexa rank. It will view your website as credible and trustworthy, making it more visible. However, it would help if you had quality websites with authority to get the most benefits to make your website more visible to search engines.
Another link that can increase your visibility is internal links with inbound links. Internal links are links on your website that leads visitors to another page or post on your website. This is important because it guides visitors through your website and keeps them engaged with its content. It increases your website’s visibility from search engines because it will tell search engines that it has valuable, credible, and relevant content. This will get more traffic onto your website and make you rank higher in the Alexa ranks.
Analyzing Alexa Data
A fantastic resource to increase your Alexa rank is using Alexa analysis tools. Alexa has all sorts of information relevant to your website and your competitors. Use this to your advantage to increase your Alexa rank. It tells an analysis of your keywords, compares your website too similar websites, social engagement, audience, and more. Utilizing its data is a huge advantage to see what is working well and what needs improvement for your website.
Take the data that Alexa gives you to improve the areas of your website to get more traffic or take inspiration from your competitors to get more traffic. It is a treasure trove of information that allows you to update your website content, keyword, and engagement to get the best traffic to your website. As a result, it will get you more traffic to your website and increase your Alexa rank.
Takeaway
Creating a website is hard work, but it is also hard to measure its success. The Alexa ranks provide an excellent estimate of how successful a website is. The Alexa ranks is a resource to help web developers figure out what they need to do to make their website a success. With Alexa rank’s analysis tools and suggestions, it provides ways to make your website a success and, in return, a better Alexa ranking. Alexa ranks may not always be accurate, but it is a great way to improve your website with its tools and data about websites. So you should utilize it to create the best website and see if your Alexa rank is improving to determine if your website is becoming more successful.
