People use Amazon's Alexa web traffic rank to estimate your site's popularity. Alexa determines your site's traffic rank based on the people who visit your site out of all the people who have installed the Alexa tool bar in their browsers. Though it is not a perfect method to determine a site's traffic, many still use it as a relative measure of web traffic.



If most of your visitors are not using the Alexa tool bar, your site's ranking in Alex will be low even if you have a decent traffic. This low ranking may affect your site's advertising rates. So, it is prudent to increase the Alexa ranking by following the 7 steps described below.

1. Get your site listed in a large number of search engines. Besides the top search engines, like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, you should submit your site to at least one hundred small and niche search engines.

Webmasters visit these small search engines and a large proportion of Webmasters have Alexa tool bar installed in their browsers. Even if you are not going to get a ton of traffic from these small search engines, but a high percentage of people coming via these search engines will have the Alexa tool bar installed.

2. Submit your sites to a large number of directories. Webmasters browse these directories and they have the Alexa bar installed. If they visit your sites, you traffic number goes up according to Alexa.

3. Join a dozen or so online marketing and webmasters forums. Create your forum signature with links to your site in your profile and regularly participate in these forums. Visitors to these forums are all webmasters and guess what? They have the Alexa tool bar installed in their browsers.

4. You can also buy forum signatures. Forum members will use forum signatures linked to your site in return for a fee. Negotiate your price for a set number of posts and new threads in month. You can use the fees paid for forum signature as one of your advertisement expenses in your tax return.

5. Asian online users are increasing in a massive way. Create your profiles in social networking sites popular in Asia, e.g. hi5, orkut, etc. Develop an Asian webmaster friends network using the social media sites. As the Alexa ranking depends on world wide visitors, when these Asian webmasters visit your site, you will get a boost in Alex traffic ranking.

6. If you site is a general purpose portal useful to a wide range web surfers, you can persuade internet or cyber cafes to install the Alexa tool bar and set your site as the home page of their browsers for a monthly fee.

7. Encourage your visitors to install Alex tool bar. Install the tool bar in all your home computers and ask your friends to also install the tool bar. More people visiting your sites with the tool bar installed, better your Alexa traffic will be.

Though there are other methods like "auto surf" to increase your Alexa traffic ranking, those are not ethical ways because visitors don't even look at your site. Your goal is to have a large percentage of real visitors to your site has Alexa tool bar.