Generally, the goal when working on an Alexa ranking is to reach the top 100,000, as that seems to be the benchmark for when advertisers start to seriously look at your site. A couple of months ago I started working on my Alexa ranking with a goal in mind of breaking into the top 100,000. I am pleased to report that as of May 9, 2007, I have broken into the top 100,000 of the Alexa rankings:

Kyle Alexa

What two steps did I take to go from over 200,000 to under 100,000 in a few months? Well, the first and most important step was to place the Alexa widget on my sidebar. Alexa needs to see your traffic to your site in order to improve your ranking, and many people do not use the Alexa toolbars. Therefore, by placing this widget on your blogs sidebar, everytime a unique visitor loads your page (by placing it on the sidebar, this applies to any page on your site, not just your homepage) the widget pings Alexa and they see the unique visitor. This adds up over time and makes the most difference of anything you could do. The other step I took was to download the Search Status Firefox extension. This serves the same purpose, by pinging Alexa each time I visit a website (so it can check the Alexa ranking).

Overall, I am very pleased with the progress my Alexa ranking has made and look forward to continuing to work on it.