Alexa Space - The Cream Doesn't Rise to the Top, it Works its Way Up
by Britney MayCom
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In the early days of the Internet, it was a wild frontier, with Usenet, BBS and FTP, I even remember dialing into other computers via the phone lines. Those days are gone, and the new Net has become wilder than before. It now requires a new site to start at the bottom and work its way up. With an ever increasing scope, depth, and variety of unique information it's surprising that we can still find what we need, enter Alexa Internet Inc. This San Francisco company is far from a silicon startup. Owned by Amazon.com this web traffic ratings company is one of the few reliable methods for rating the viability, popularity and usability of sites on the Web.

Our research suggests that all sites start near the bottom of Alexa's massive rankings directory with a rating of 4,000,000 or more (like golf, lower scores are better). Then quickly move up (to a lower rating number) as the site gains popularity and scope. After reaching the 1,000,000 mark your site will be subjected to greater scrutiny by Alexa's army of robot spiders who will more frequently visit your site looking for updates. This is where the task of improving a site's rank gets more difficult. You have less distance to go, but each move will be smaller and broadening your web presence will become more difficult. If Alexa likes your site, it has an adequate amount of traffic, it has a reasonable response time for users and Alexa's spiders are finding that the site is being maintained, you may find yourself reaching the magical 100,000 site mark. Why is 100,000 a magical number, well this is when your site will receive daily rank updates and a fancy chart on Alexa's web page. There are ad Agencies, web directories, and economic agencies that purchase the top 100,000 list from Alexa as well, it doesn't hurt to be noticed.

Working Your Way Up

While some sites suggest artificial tactics and strategies to raise ratings, we contend that this is a serious misuse of time. While you may see a large, onetime, spike in your rating it is unlikely to maintain that rating without worthwhile content to keep your users happy. The web site sector is just like any other sector, you want to attract customers but also work hard to keep them. While it doesn't hurt to have the Alexa Toolbar installed, or even to attract Alexa users to your site to boost ratings, there are much more effective, productive ways to work up to a higher Alexa Rank. We recommend reliable, timely, unique and consistent updates to your content. While it may take a considerable amount of time and money to provide users with unique and consistent content, it will pay off in the long run.

Once your site has achieved a fairly respectable rank in the top 500,000 world sites, you may want to change your strategy a bit. To get to this point you may have used several of the tactics espoused on the Net, but to improve from here you need a professional strategy. Several concepts that will take your site from one million to one hundred thousand are release schedules, unique content and selective backlinking. By regularly releasing unique content your site will gain popularity among your reader base as well as indexing spiders that are privy to whether your content is available at other locations. When backlinking it is critical to have high quality, read high pagerank, sites linking in to your site. Think quality over quantity here.

If I had 2 Hours to Chop Down a Tree, I'd Spend 1 Hour 50 Minutes Sharpening my Axe

The same goes for your selection, headlines and search term research. Spend at least half the time you have for each blog entry, article or product page doing research to find the search incidence of key terms, writing an appealing headline and making sure your selection has an appropriate search to competitiveness ratio.

Planning the release dates of content is nearly as important as delivering quality content. By having a release schedule you will ensure that those hungry spiders have something to index when they visit your site. Your site will also gain credibility by having updated content released on a regular basis. You may use one of the many content management systems available to achieve this with little mental bandwidth.

Brick and Mortar still Affects the Internet

Advertising on Digg, Google and Yahoo will boost your Alexa rank, but with an exclusive focus on our websites we often forget about traditional advertising outlets. Traditional advertising channels such as television, radio, newspaper, trade publications, mailers, press releases, brochures and billboards can all have a direct impact on a site's Google and Alexa ratings. Ignore traditional advertising at your own peril.