If you are a serious website owner or a professional blogger who wants to take your online presence to the next level, I have good news and bad news for you.

Let us deal with the bad news first.

1,295,973,827

This is how many websites there are as of January 2020. Another internet statistic says it is 1.7 billion! Whether 1.2 billion or 1.7 billion, one thing is sure that this number is increasing exponentially every second and it is becoming increasingly difficult for small websites or blogs to stand out from the crowd and get noticed.

Yes, it is difficult, but it is not impossible because there is always a way. That is the good news.

What is Alexa Ranking?

If you’re thinking "Alexa, play some songs" then you’re thinking of the wrong Alexa.

But, if you have associated Alexa with Amazon, you are on the right track. Though Amazon Alexa and Amazon's Alexa Ranking are two different things.

While Amazon Alexa is an A.I. powered virtual assistant, Amazon's Alexa ranking is a single metric to measure the popularity of websites.

How is Alexa Rank calculated?

The clue behind Alexa Rank calculation is hidden in plain sight with the text that comes with the rank itself.

Alexa rank

If you read the full result, it says "This site ranks: #33,397 in global internet traffic and engagement over the past 90 days".

Alexa collects quite a lot of web traffic data samples from millions of users around the world over a rolling 3-month period and puts it through its sophisticated analytical tools. These enormous sampling data from around the world thus becomes the basis of Alexa’s traffic estimates and ranks.

The popularity rank is calculated using Alexa's proprietary methodology that combines a site's estimated average of daily unique visitors and its estimated number of pageviews over the past 3 months.

Alexa ranking is based on a combined measure of Unique Visitors, Pageviews and Engagement.

This global traffic rank thus becomes a measure of how a website is doing relative to all other sites on the web over the past 3 months.

What is My Alexa Rank?

If you have already started wondering how popular your site is on the internet, all you have to do is go to alexa.com/siteinfo, type in your website URL and run an analysis.

This will then tell you how your site ranks in global internet traffic and engagement, over the past 90 days. It also shows a bunch of other key metrics such as the top keywords connected with your website, other websites that have similar content and a few other metrics to show the engagement on your site.

If you happen to see a fewer digit number, for example: 8754, great! You are doing pretty good on the global ranking because smaller the number, better your online presence.

If your number is quite high such as 51,775,609, worry not, the ranking can be improved and you will find more about how to improve it, in a moment.

What is so special about Alexa

There are so many metrics out there, Domain Authority, Page Authority, Google ranking, page speed index, etc etc. So why do you care about yet another metric?!

Now Alexa is a public, single metric that tells you the popularity of a website.

So, a website might be looking great, it might have tall claims regarding its reach and it even might have good domain authority. But when you check the Alexa rank of that website, you get a better picture instantly and verify if all those tall claims are true or not.

If you are a serious blogger or a PR person looking at brand collaboration, Alexa rank can be a deciding factor. A PR person can easily verify an influencer's website reach while a blogger can use a good Alexa rank to their advantage to sign up for better brand collaborations.

Now comes the real cherry!

How to Improve My Alexa Rank

Publish fresh content regularly

If you are a blogger, you must be knowing, you get a traffic surge, however small it is when you post new content. Your loyal readers come to your blog to read your latest post.

Create engaging original content

Whenever you create new content, try to make it as engaging as possible. If your latest engaging content leads a new reader to another post, this further increases the number of page views leading to better chances of improving Alexa Ranking.

Share your content over social media channels

Having a share button on your posts helps both you and your readers to share your content easily. When your loyal readers share one of your latest engaging content within their network, it is going to create some curiosity and in turn, create some new readers for your content. Social sharing creates more number of unique visitors and thereby improves your Alexa ranking.

Network with other websites to create more visibility

When you network with other bloggers or website owners, what you get in return is backlinks. These backlinks can help you build better trust and create what is known as domain authority, if done right. It brings more traffic from those sources as well. All these things help you rank better on internet search results. If people find your content through internet searches, that means more unique number of visitors and page views.

Let SEO work for you

When your content is optimized for search engines, your chances of getting listed on the first pages of internet search results are more and thus you bring more traffic to your website. To achieve better SEO, use SEO plugins if you are a WordPress user. Other platforms offer their own built-in SEO checklists and such, to be on track with the optimization.

Join #MyFriendAlexa campaign

Find everything overwhelming? Join MyFriendAlexa campaign and learn by doing! It also helps you achieve all the points mentioned above and better your Alexa rank.

The aim of all the above-mentioned points is to increase the traffic to your website. The more traffic you can attract to your website, the better is your website's Alexa rank.