Social Media Sunday – Alexa Rankings

Okay, so Alexa isn’t *exactly* social media.  However, if you have a blog, it’s a website. And while your blog may be the only component of your social media life (although not likely since a lot of you tweet/Facebook/pin etc.), it is still generally considered social media.  Your blog is a social media component and a website.

That means it has an Alexa rating and knowing about Alexa and your Alexa ranking might be important. Not life-altering important, but you should be in-the-know.

Alexa is a part of Amazon and collects information about websites and ranks them based on traffic, more here on Wikipedia, but that is the gist of it.

I don’t have any fast and loose tips for you to improve your Alexa, because I personally don’t know what they are!  And I am not really sure anyone does…I just want to bring the topic to your attention.

The reason? Agency folks, (PR, social media, etc.) are looking at it to make decisions on projects, programs and influence; we talked about influence a couple of weeks ago here.  Why are they looking at your Alexa ranking?  Usually its because you haven’t given them anything else to go by, like a Media Kit or other important information about your blog that you might detail in your About page in order to help them out.

So if you aren’t going to utilize a media kit and are going to rely on your Alexa ranking, there are some generally accepted best practices to ensure that you have the basics covered.

[1] Claim your website on Alexa.com. Just like claiming your site on Google, Yahoo and Bing, you should claim your site on Alexa. Go to Alexa (the Dashboard page) and  register your blog.

[2] Download the Alexa toolbar (download here) and use it every day to visit your own website.

[3]  Start visiting other sites as well and encourage your readers to install the toolbar on their own sites.

[4] Write reviews on the blogs you like (I just realized yesterday that I have not done a really good job at this and I am making amends to fix that!).  What comes around goes around, you may have others write ones about you!

There are other things I have seen written, but I have not found real good explanations as to why they help so I am leery and therefore won’t include them.  The reason I even write that is to emphasize to you that there is a lot of theory out there and not a lot of fact.  Like Google rankings and SEO and Klout, Alexa has a magic formula that they aren’t going to share. There are people out there who are good at sussing out the best way to beat the systems, but I don’t have the time, energy or inclination to do that.  Instead I would rather follow some basic best practices and leave it at that!

And if you have been around here any length of time you know that I strive to do things to help others.  Support is an essential element that makes the blogosphere move.  So by installing the Alexa widget and visiting other blogs, which is something I do every day and every week, I help others increase their Alexa scores.  That is enough for me to install and use the widget.

How about you? Do you agree? Do you have a tip to add?