In this article, I’ll examine the importance of the Alexa Rank as it relates to site monetization while briefly discussing some of the weaknesses involved in using Alexa ranking as a reliable traffic measure for any website.

Lastly, I’ve also included an extensive list of twenty methods and strategies you can use to increase your Alexa Rank dramatically in the short and long run.

What is the Alexa Rank?

Put simply, the Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases its ranking schema on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who visit a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

See Alexa’s definition of the Alexa Traffic Rank:

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.

The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users)

Why would you want to increase your Alexa rank?

Webmasters, advertisers and ad networks use your blog’s Alexa rank as a gauge to determine the worth of a link on your website. If you depend on link or site selling as a form of monetization you’ll definitely want to increase your Alexa rank, because it’ll increase your bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing.

ReviewMe, Text Link Ads and Sponsored Reviews are just three of the networks which base your ad selling strength on Alexa Ranks.

Problems with the Alexa Rank

Alexa ranking is heavily skewed towards websites which have a large webmaster/tech audience. This is because webmasters or web savvy audiences are much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed than websites whose visitors are unaware of Alexa.

As such, many have indicated that Alexa is a vastly inaccurate method of measuring a website’s reach, traffic and potential. I don’t disagree.

Alexa is a silly way to measure web traffic but unfortunately, in an imperfect world Alexa is still heavily used by webmasters and ad networks when measuring the value of advertising on your website.

I understand the defects of Alexa’s ranking system and I’m not going to go into more detail about it here. What’s primarily important to me is that the Alexa Rank has become a central element in site monetization strategies.

I’m not concerned with the utility and value of Alexa but it’s perceived importance in the eyes of potential advertisers.

Dosh Dosh’s Alexa Rank

Since moving to my own domain (from Blogspot) in the middle of January 2007, Dosh Dosh has moved from a rank of around 3 million to the current Alexa rank of 21, 709 within two months.

The growth has been consistent and I think most of it was due to the fact that the content on Dosh Dosh is orientated towards webmasters. Another plausible reason is because overall daily traffic for Dosh Dosh has been growing steadily day by day.

The increase in Alexa Rank was also partially due to the fact that I’m active in several webmaster forums, notably Digital Point which sends me some visitors every day. Getting stumbled and receiving thousands of visitors in a day has also undoubtedly helped to increase Dosh Dosh’s Alexa Rank.

How do I get started with Alexa?

There are two easy ways to start using Alexa. If you are using Internet Explorer, visit this page and download the Alexa Toolbar. If you’re using Firefox, download the SearchStatus extension which displays the Alexa Rank, Google PageRank as well as other useful features.

I highly recommend that you use Firefox and SearchStatus instead of Alexa toolbar, which I find to be more bulky and less useful.

Can one actually game or manipulate the Alexa Ranking?

I believe that there are methods which will allow you to easily bring an Alexa ranking in the millions down to the 100,000 level. However, bringing it past the 10,000 or 1,000 mark is a considerably more difficult process, because of the stiff competition among websites.

Some have adamantly stated that there are no proven ways to game Alexa, while others have claimed that auto-surfs and scripts do work to some degree.

I’m not going to take any sides because I can’t guarantee that auto-surfs or other artificial methods will have similar effects for every blog.

The easiest way to know to know if any of the tips mentioned below really work is to actually try them for yourselves and monitor the results.

20 Ways to Increase your Alexa Rank

Here is a collection of methods you can use to boost your Alexa Rank. Most of these tips are derived from several fellow webmasters I know who claimed to have derived positive results through their experiments with the Alexa Rankings.

Some of the other tips were derived articles and sources, which I have duly referenced at the end of this post.

Do these tips work? According to some, yes they definitely do work. But do note that most of them require active effort of some sort and hence, they will work as long as long as you are consistently performing specific actions.

To increase your Alexa rank in the long run, I would highly recommended that one focus on developing quality content which attracts and maintains a large audience instead of purely focusing on artificially increasing your Alexa Rank.

Great link-worthy content will leads to an natural increase in site traffic and is an excellent way to passively increase your Alexa rank.

It is important to emphasize that you should devote most of your efforts in growing your site audience alongside integrated implementation of any of the following tips below.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.
2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day. According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.
3. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers. Be sure to link to Alexa’s full explanation of their toolbar and tracking system so your readers know what installing the toolbar or extension entails.
4. Work in an Office or own a company? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers. Perhaps it will be useful to note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPs are used.
5. Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.
6. Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.
7. Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters usually have the toolbar installed. You’ll get webmasters to visit your website and offer useful feedback. It’s also a good way to give back to the community if you have useful articles to share with others.
8. Write content that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.
9. Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.media143.com . Replace media143.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help. There is no official proof that redirects positively benefit your Alexa Rank, so use with caution.
10. Post in Asian social networking websites or forums. Some webmasters have suggested that East Asian web users are big Alexa toolbar fans, judging by the presence of several Asia-based websites in the Alexa Top 500. I suggest trying this only if you have the time or capacity to do so.
11. Create a webmaster tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often revisit your website to gain access to the tools. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very good example.
12. Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop link worthy material.
13. Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic. Doubly useful when your ad is highly relevant to webmasters.
14. Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while helping you rank in the search engines.
15. Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget/graph at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.
16. Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster forums and websites. A prominent and well displayed ad will drive lots of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your rank.
17. Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or promote specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis. You can easily find posters for hire in Digital Point and other webmaster forums.
18. Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers. This might be difficult to arrange and isn’t really a viable solution for most. I’m keeping this one in because some have suggested that it does work.
19. Use MySpace . This is a little shady so I don’t recommended it unless you’re really interested in artificially inflating your Alexa Rank. Use visually attractive pictures or banners and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. This will be most effective if your website has content that is actually relevant to the MySpace Crowd.
20. Try Alexa auto-surfs. Do they work? Maybe for brand new sites. I think they are mostly suitable for new websites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so I suggest using with caution.

Resources on Alexa Rank

Several of the tips listed above were taken from Aaron Wall’s article on Alexa Ranking. This post by Aaron will also give you some insight on Alexa’s webmaster bias.

A lower Alexa number means a greater level of traffic, and the traffic drops off logarithmically. You can fake a good Alexa score using various techniques, but if it shows your rankings in the millions then your site likely has next to no traffic.

Alexa by itself does not mean that much, but it simply provides a rough snapshot of what is going on. It can be spammed, but if a site has a ranking in the millions then it likely has little traffic.

Peter Norvig writes about Alexa Toolbar and the Problem of Experiment Design. He examines some problems with Alexa as a traffic measuring tool:

But one bias they don’t really comment on is the selection bias: the data would be good if it truly represented a random sample of internet users, but in fact it only represents those who have installed the Alexa toolbar, and that sample is not random.

The samplees must be sophisticated enough to know how to install the toolbar, and they must have some reason to want it. It turns out that the toolbar tells you things about web sites, so it is useful to people in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry, so it overrepresents those people.

Google’s Matt Cutts compares his website against Ask.com and explains why his website enjoys such an impressive Alexa ranking:

One possible source of skewing in Alexa data is a bias toward webmaster-y sites. Alexa shows how popular web sites are, so it’s natural that webmasters install the Alexa toolbar.

Some do it just so that their normal day-to-day visits around the web (including their own site) are added to Alexa’s stats. The net effect is that webmaster-related sites are going to look more important to Alexa

Marketing Scoop has some tips on improving the Alexa Rank. (Thanks Beth!)

A very long thread on Digital Point which sees webmasters having a discussion on how Alexa Ranks can be gamed or manipulated through scripts and auto-surfs. Worth a read.

There you have it… twenty ways to boost your Alexa Rank and increase your site’s monetization potential.

What do you think of Alexa? Have you tried increasing your Alexa Rank by any of these methods?

If you’ll like to receive future updates on ways to improve your Alexa Rank, do consider subscribing to my blog feed.

It is not hard to be barking up the wrong tree when it comes to getting search engine traffic because there is so much out of date information being circulated.

That is why it is always best to also learn many other traffic generation methods like viral marketing for example.

Not only is there out of date or invalid SEO advice getting around, there is also information which if acted upon, can result in your pages being banned.

The SEO tips below should assist the reader in forming a basic understanding of how to create human friendly web pages which are easily understood by the most popular search engines.

Know this. There are thousands of search engines but only two of them will bring you most of the traffic. They are google and yahoo. Another search engine that brings me a little traffic is msn but I do not focus too much on tactics for that engine.

Focus your attention on the engines that will bring you the most visitors first and work your way down.

Basic SEO

1. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing targeted traffic to your site.

Make sure that the title tag contains text which a human can relate to. The text within the title tag is what shows up in a search result. Treat it like a headline.

2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.

3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.

Adding the exact same text for your h1 tag will tell the reader who clicks on your page from a search engine result that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page where they intended to visit. Robots like this too because now there is a relation between the title of your page and the headline.

Also, sprinkle your keywords throughout your article. The most important keywords can be bolded or colored in red. A good place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your article and in the sub-headings.

4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.

I always use the headline of my pages as the title tag to help the robots know exactly what my page is about. A good place to insert the headline is within the h1 tag. So the headline is the same as the title tag text.

5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. SEO pros all agree that these tags are not as important today as they once were. I just place my headline once within the keywords and description tags.

6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods.

7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.

8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.

My site contains navigation menus on the left and right of the page. The menu consists of links not images. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of the link appears. View the source of this page to see how to add this tag to your links.

9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.

10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use a submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.

Here is the submission page for google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Submit only once. There is no need to submit every two weeks. There is no need to submit more than one page. Robots follow links. If your site has a nice link trail, your entire site will get indexed.

My site has a nice human friendly link trail which robots follow easily. All my pages get indexed without ever submitting more than the main index page once.

Accounting professionals learn how to get the information they need fast with this guide to Excel features that manipulate and sort financial data. Comprehensive but concise chapters explain how to automate the entry of common business formulas; how to use pivot tables to extract details; how to develop inventory, depreciation, and financial summaries; and how to set up other standard financial calculations.

http://rapidshare.com/files/368191155/Excel4Accountants.rar

Jeffrey Zeldman is The Beatles of web standards. Or maybe the Elvis Presley of web standards. Regardless, Zeldman doesn’t just talk the talk, he walks the green mile. He is a tireless promoter and evangelist for standards. This book is intelligent, funny, and entertaining. If you’re looking for an engaging book, go here. If you prefer your web design books on the drier, technical side, look elsewhere. Then again, you probably enjoy reading leases in your spare time.

This book will make more sense when you are in the moderately experienced stage of CSS design. The basic premise is this: The authors have created a web site CSS Zen Garden that uses a static source HTML file. Only the stylesheet changes through user contributions. It’s really an eye-opening example of the power of CSS for presentation. The book has several chapters dedicated to layout, typography and imagery to show you just how much of these individual components can be altered aesthetically with different stylesheets.

O.K., maybe you enjoy reading leases. Not the most entertaining book in the bunch, but that’s not why we like this one. Keep this right next to your laptop (or desktop) as the perfect reference guide. Particularly helpful for the brain-cramp moments when you forget some elemental syntax. Pretty much covers all the bases and part of shallow left-field too.

The Art and Science of CSS can probably be read in an afternoon, but the brevity of the book doesn’t take away it’s usefulness. The book is authored by web professionals Jonathan Snook, Steve Smith, Jina Bolton, Cameron Adams, and David Johnson. They take you through different parts of CSS design like backgrounds, headings, forms and navigation using real world examples from beginning to end. We’ve picked up a few indispensable tips from this one.

If you don’t know even know how to turn on a computer, yet have a savage desire to design for the web, buy this book. It assumes you don’t know a damn thing about HTML or CSS and walks you though the whole process. It’s also charming and funny. Maybe it goes a little overboard with the levity at times, but that’s probably an attempt to make the subject less intimidating for the beginner. It succeeds.

If Jeffrey Zeldman is the Beatles of web standards, that makes Dan Cederholm the Rolling Stones. Or Herman’s Hermits. Or….errr…O.K., scratch that. Web Standards Solutions is applicable for more advanced practitioners of the evil art of web design. This one is perfect if you already have a decent knowledge base. A lot of us have built up bad habits through the years due to lack of experience, unwillingness to change, or just plain laziness. Cederholm helps you break that cycle with practical solutions for doing things the right way.

We highly recommend this book as a neophyte’s guide to CSS. McFarland does a great job at making difficult concepts appear simple. He uses the same example site all throughout the book to keeps thing focused. The chapters on positioning alone make The Missing Manual a must buy.

This little gem came out a few months ago and “little” is the operative word. It only weighs in at a little over 200 pages. The book is more for an intermediate level of proficiency and delves into the little details that make a website shine like the chapter on craftsmanship. The authors go into a few CCS3 techniques like the opacity property that can be implemented right now.

Another great book on doing things the right way. It covers many “best practice” ideas as well as common bug fixes and different browser support issues.(There’s that old bugbear!)

Web Standards Creativity is sure to get you excited and inspired. Written by many of the studs of modern web design, it not only looks pretty but offers tons of practical advice that you can implement in your own designs. I always flip through this book when I feel creatively stagnant. It’s the literary equivalent of a 64oz. Red Bull.

I drew the chart above with the <canvas> element. So if you can’t see it, I guess that means your browser doesn’t support it. I didn’t do anything fancy at all, just some rectangles, this is literally my first time trying it. The bars represent the different “ways you can email” described in the opening post.

The runaway winner was Pure Cloud, with 53% of people that exclusively use an online mail service, through a browser, like GMail or Yahoo or Hotmail or whatever else. In second place, Localized Cloud, with 21% of people who use an online mail service, but pipe it through a local mail program. 18% said Pure Local, meaning they use a local mail program as well as run their own mail servers on their own domain names. Finally, only 8% said they used a Clouded Local setup, where they run their own domains and mail servers, but use an online mail service to interact with it.

The results actually don’t surprise me all that much, but the debate did. I expected a little more heat, with people explaining how their setup was clearly the only way to go when it comes to email. Here are my fake arguments:

Pure Cloud

• The browser email experience is far superior to the desktop client!
• I can access my email from any computer in the world and have it be exactly the same experience as if I was at home!
• My email is safe from computer failure!
• The spam filtering is second to none!
• Not running my own mail servers saves precious server resources!

Localized Cloud

• Web applications do not run as smoothly and reliably as desktop apps!
• I get all the benefits of browser based email with a superior client!
• My email is backed up offline!
• (Services like) Google go down a far less often than personal servers do!

Pure Local

• There is no middle man reading my email!
• No companies are gathering information on me!
• My email is 100% under my control!
• I laugh at you clouded people when your email goes down and there is nothing you can do about it!

Clouded Local

• I get all the benefits of having my email be totally under my control WITH the benefits of having a consistent online email platform!
• I have a fallback when online mail goes down!

But anyway… I guess the point is there are advantages and disadvantages to any of the different ways to go. Personally I’m Pure Cloud. 98% of the time I’m as happy as can be and I sing the praises of GMail. Then it goes down and I whine and whine.

New poll will go up sometime soonish. Gonna be an interesting one again I think.

AJAX & CSS Flickr-like Editing Fields

AJAX Instant Edit

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML isn’t a new programming language, as it is often mistakingly called. Basically, AJAX is a set of XHTML, CSS, DOM, XMLHttpRequest and XML, put together and used together for the same purpose – to improve the user-server-interaction.

In this article we’d like to present a list of over 90 useful AJAX-based techniques you should always have ready to hand developing AJAX-based web-applications. Auto-completion, instant field editing, menus, calendars, interactive elements, visual effects, animation, basic javascripts, as well as an extensive developer’s suite should give you a useful and powerful toolbox you can use every day, without a need to go through hundreds of AJAX-related bookmarks.

AJAX Auto Completer

1. AJAX AutoSuggest: An AJAX auto-complete text field

2. AJAX Autocompleter / script.aculo.us library

3. AJAX AutoCompleter

4. Ajax autosuggest/autocomplete from database

5. Ajax dynamic list

Over the last few years web-developers have written many articles about CSS and developed many useful techniques, which can save you a lot of time – of course, if you are able to find them in time. Below you’ll find a list of techniques we , as web-architects, really couldn’t live without. They are essential and they indeed make our life easier. Let’s take a look at  CSS-based techniques you should always have ready to hand if you develop web-sites

1. CSS Based Navigation

2. Navigation Matrix Reloaded

3. CSS Tabs

4. CSS Bar Graphs (CSS For Bar Graphs)

5. Collapsing Tables: An Example

6. Adam’s Radio & Checkbox Customisation Method

7. CSS Image Replacement

8. CSS Shadows (CSS Shadows Roundup)

9. CSS Rounded Corners Roundup (Nifty Corners)

10. Drop Cap – Capital Letters with CSS

11. Define Image Opacity with CSS

12. How to Create a Block Hover Effect for a List of Links

13. Pullquotes with CSS (Automatic Pullquotes with JavaScript and CSS

14. CSS Diagrams

15. CSS Curves

16. Footer Stick allows for the footer of a Web page to appear either at the bottom of the browser window or the bottom of the Web page content – whichever is visually lowest.

17. CSS Image Map

18. CSS Image Pop-Up

20. CSS Image Replacement for Buttons

21. Link Thumbnail

22. CSS Map Pop

23. PHP-based CSS Style Switcher

24. CSS Unordered List Calender (CSS Styled Calender)

25. CSS-Based Forms: Techniques

26. CSS-Based Tables: Techniques

27. Printing Web-Documents and CSS

28. Improved Links-Display for Print-Layouts with CSS

29. CSS-Submit Buttons

30. CSS Teaser Box

31. CSS Tricks for Custom Bullets

32. Ticked Off Links Reloaded

33. CSS Zooming

34. Creating a Star Rater using CSS

35. The ways to style visited Links

36. PDF, ZIP, DOC Links Labeling

37. Displaying Percentages with CSS

38. Image Floats without the Text Wrap

39. Let visitors decide, whether or not will they open link in a new window

40. Simple accessible external links

41. Zebra Table with JavaScript and CSS

42. Vertical Centering with CSS (Horizontal and Vertical Centering with CSS

43. Unobtrusive Sidenotes

44. Image Caption with CSS (Styled Images with Caption)

45. Dynamic Piechart with CSS

46. Format Footnotes with CSS

47. Hierarchical Sitemap with CSS

48. Snook’s Resizable Underlines

49. Switchy McLayout: An Adaptive Layout Technique

50. StyleMap: CSS+HTML Visual Sitemap

51. Custom Reading Width

52. CSS Alert Message

53. CSS Production Notes

Wei-Meng Lee, “Windows 7: Up and Running: A quick, hands-on introduction”
O’Reilly Media, Inc. | 2009 | ISBN: 0596804040 | 202 pages | PDF | 8,8 MB

This compact book offers the quickest path for Windows users to get started with Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system. You get the essential information you need to upgrade or install the system and configure it to fit your activities, along with a tour of Windows 7’s features and built-in applications.

Microsoft has learned from the mistakes of Windows Vista, and Windows 7 shows it-this new OS is much faster and more stable. With Windows 7: Up and Running, you’ll learn what’s new and what’s changed from XP and Vista, and get advice on ways to use this system for work, entertainment, instant communication, and more. Windows 7 is poised to be a big hit, and with this handy guide, you can be up and running — and productive — with it right away.

Master the user interface, including the taskbar, jump lists, desktop gadgets, Aero Shake, and notification area
Discover the joys of networking with HomeGroup file sharing and improved Wi-Fi
Tour the system’s improved security, including the Action Center, User Account Control, and Credential Manager
Learn how to use Windows Live Essentials for messaging, photo sharing, moviemaking, emailing, and blogging
Get to know built-in applications such as Internet Explorer 8, Windows Media Player 12, Microsoft Paint, and WordPad
Learn about optional Microsoft software to enhance your Windows 7 experience

Click here to DOWNLOAD