I bet you’ve heard of the English Premier League, the German Bundesliga, The Italian Serie A and other football leagues; but there is one league which is way bigger than all these leagues in terms of number of participants. It is called (as you rightly suspected) the Alexa Rankings.
Alexa Rankings are a listing of the most visited websites on the internet, and as you know, the internet has millions of sites.
Just like in a football league, for a team to join the league, it has to qualify. At the moment, Alexa, the company that runs the Alexa Rankings, will only begin listing a website when its traffic pulls it up to about 30 million.
Then the more traffic a site gets, the lower it falls on the ranking (going towards number 1). So a site can have no listing on day one of operations; then as traffic increases, it starts coming down to say 20 million, 15 million, 10 million etc., in international Alexa ranking. By the time the site comes down to 1 million, it will then also be included in the national rankings of the country where it is based.
Thus, a Nigerian blog can have a Global ranking of 800,000 and a Nigerian ranking 4000 at the same time.
Importance Of Alexa Ranking
Some people will ask, what is the importance of Alexa Ranking. Well, if you are a blogger that wants to sell direct adverts on your blog, then your site’s Alexa ranking will be very important to you.
The reason is that advertising agencies normally use Alexa Ranking to judge the popularity of a website or blog before they decide to advertise. So, if you have a very good ranking on Alexa, they would advertise on your site, giving you money.
How Does Alexa Rank Sites?
Alexa calculates the amount of traffic each site has gotten in the last 30 days and compares it with the amount of traffic other sites have gotten in the same period. That’s how it ranks sites.
And How Does It Calculate The Traffic?
There are many people that have the Alexa toolbar installed on the desktop of their computers. Alexa calculates its rankings based on which sites these people visit. It is sort of like taking an opinion poll. Only a fraction of the population takes part in the poll, but if the poll is professionally taken, you can say it represents more or less the views of the larger populace.
How Can A Blogger Get A Good Alexa Ranking?
- Post great content: If you post great content, people will naturally want to read it and search engines will want to crawl it. By great content, we mean posting unique content not just copying and pasting other people’s work. We mean being careful not to make spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors in your posts.
If you are in the habit of copy and paste, you are doing yourself a great disservice. Ask yourself why people will want to come and read what you have copied from somewhere and pasted when they can go to the original site?
This does not mean you cannot use other people’s articles to build up your own, but let their articles be the starting/supporting point of your argument not the whole point. Let your articles stand out to be noticed.
2. Post Regularly
When you write a great article, many people take note of your blog. But if they come back and they don’t see anything new there, after some time they’ll stop coming.
This doesn’t mean you must post every day. It means that if you don’t post every day, you must learn to have a regular schedule for your posts, so that your readers will know that even if you don’t post every day, that by so and so time on so and so day, they can count on seeing some great new post on your blog.
3. Share Your Posts On Social Media
When you share your post on your Facebook page, broadcast it on BlackBerry, and so on, people will see that you have written something new, and if your headline is catchy enough, they are likely to click to see what you wrote. When they click on the link and it takes them to your site, that is traffic, and Alexa will count that.
4. Post Some Of Your Articles On Forums And Link Back To Your Site
Online forums are similar to social media platforms like Facebook, only that unlike a Facebook, for instance, they have the power of anonymity. People who have opinions they want to share but who for some reason or the other want to remain anonymous prefer to post on forums rather than social media platforms. Nairaland.com is an example of a forum.
When you share one of your blog’s posts on a forum, and you put the link back to your blog, you are making your blog popular, and people will want to follow the link and go check out your blog. Posting in forums has contributed to this blog’s popularity.
5. Post Trending News Stories
Trending news stories are stories that have got a lot of people talking. You can find a lot of such stories on Twitter. Get the trending story , and give your readers your take on it. Lot’s of people are interested in getting commentary on news stories they see on the internet.
Conclusion
If you do all these things more and more people will come to your blog, Alexa will notice that and rank you better and better, and one day, you may find yourself making some serious money on the internet.
P:s
Alexa has a paid version where they rank you more accurately. Most Alexa rankings are estimates from Alexa, based on the sites people with Alexa toolbar visit, but if you pay for the paid version, they will rank you more accurately. Having said that, they are so many good blogs making mad money that have never paid Alexa a dime, and yet their estimated traffic based is more than enough to rank them well.
Warning Against Using Black Hat (Illegal) Methods To Try To Get Better Ranking On Alexa
It is possible to try to game the system by buying Alexa Traffic. That may rank you well at the beginning, but when Alexa sniffs you out, their penalty will knock your blog so hard in the rankings, its head will be spinning. Better to concentrate on hard but legal ways like creating great content that will draw natural traffic to your site.
I’m out of here. Don’t forget me when the money begins to roll in from direct adverts on your blog.
Nice
Intending bloggers need to go through this