Alexa is one of the most prominent ranking systems on the internet today. Alexa, a subsidiary company of Amazon ranks websites based on the number of users who visit those websites with the Alexa toolbar installed. The user base of the Alexa toolbar is well into the millions, because of this, it is one of the most accurate ways of gauging your website's popularity.

For those of you who have monetized your websites, Alexa ranking can be crucial to the amount of income you are pulling in. Increasing your Alexa rank can greatly increase your bargaining power when it comes to negotiating ad prices. You are also more likely to be contacted directly by the advertisers, as Alexa ranking is one of the criteria they look at when finding places to advertise. Affiliate networks commonly use Alexa rank during the review of an applicant. I used Wealth-Ed's Alexa ranking to get accepted into the NeverBlue Network.

Increasing your Alexa ranking can be tricky. The best ways to achieve a higher ranking are to post unique content and post at least 3 new articles per week (this is a general strategy for any sort of SEO or indexing campaigns). Be sure you install the Alexa toolbar as well, I have included links at the bottom of this post. Create a post on your website about Alexa and it's importance to webmasters to encourage your reader base to download the toolbar.

There are some other ways to increase your Alexa rank. You can sign up for an Alexa rank auto-surf website. UpMyRank is one of these websites. It is a program which will automatically visit the websites of other users and checks to make sure the client has the Alexa toolbar installed before they can earn credits. Each credit is then worth one page visit for your website from someone with the toolbar installed.

Alexa has it's flaws. For instance, the Alexa toolbar is generally unknown to the average internet user. Because of this, websites with a large following of tech savvy people have a better chance of ranking higher within the system as their users are more likely to have the toolbar installed.

You can find the Alexa toolbar here: Alexa Toolbar

And for the FireFox users you can download the Search Status addon here: Search Status Addon

Please visit SmashSEO.com for tips on Search Engine Optimization