Two weeks ago on December 24, 2007, the Alexa Ranking of this domain, hochstadt.com, was below 3,000,000. Today, its one-week [...]]]> Would you like to increase the Alexa Ranking of your Web site? I did it myself a couple times already, and once again just recently.

Two weeks ago on December 24, 2007, the Alexa Ranking of this domain, hochstadt.com, was below 3,000,000. Today, its one-week average is at a more glorious 175,347. (In Brazil, I’m even on 19,264!) That’s a huge jump of more than 2,800,000 spots. (With the 1,400% jump in Reach they currently display, I actually should be on the Movers/Shakers page, shouldn’t I? ;-)

How did I accomplish that?

Simple answer: I initiated a traffic boost.

I own that domain since 2002, but up to that point I used it mainly for my day-to-day e-mail communication. In December, I decided it was time to “do something more useful” with it and put up a blog. I then announced to the small lists I own and to a whole bunch of friends and relatives by mentioning a Christmas Card in HTML format. (It was a plain simple HTML page with a picture (still live) and text in three languages, as well as a small link to the home page where I was playing around with the WordPress installation.)

Some of them obviously have the Alexa Toolbar installed. That’s where the first jump around Christmas occurred.

The second jump happened when James Brausch honored one of my posts on his blog on January 2nd.

By the way, Jack S. Keifer has also experiences with increasing his Alexa Ranking. As of today, his one-week average ranking is at 159,503 (jumped up from 3,550,000.) Even when you compare our site’s ranking, the curves (representing the past three months) are very similar, aren’t they…

(C’mon Jack; let’s push our sites up to the next level! :-)

Jack was inspired by an article Richard Lee recently published on how to improve your site’s A-Ranking. (New word, huh?) Also a nice method to pump it up.

Bottom line? Alexa is useless for measuring your own traffic. Use more reliable tools such as Google Analytics, Site Meter, and the like for that.

It IS useful for comparing how you are doing against your competitors and friends. And the better the ranking (above 100,000) the more accurate the data becomes.

Stay within your theme, post quality content on a regular basis, and you’ll soon as well attract more visitors to your site, therefore it is likely your Alexa Ranking climbs up, too.

See you at the top!

—Marcus Hochstadt

P.S. In case you have it not done yet, here’s the link to download and install the Alexa Toolbar on your computer…

P.P.S. Here’s how I got to Alexa’s Top 100,000 within 66 days.