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Increase Your Website’s Alexa Rank!

By Stacy Prendeville

Keen users of Andalucia .com will have noticed the Alexa banner now in place on our home page. So what is Alexa and why is it important?

Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon, the company of one of the biggest website successes to date. It has the unique claim of being the first toolbar on the web and was initially distributed with Internet Explorer 5. Its popularity is substantial. It offers to its toolbar users an easy and efficient way of searching the web with a related links feature.

This feature lists a number of websites along the toolbar that are of a similar nature to the website you are currently viewing which in turn, Alexa hopes will aid your searches. You can check the top movers and shakers in the internet world currently with its top ranking sites page, not to mention the “Way Back Machine”, a fun way of viewing previous incarnations of web sites. Want to know how Andalucia.com looked in its first edition eleven years ago? Take a look here at http://www.archive.org/index.php.

It also comes with a safer surfing feature which helps to identify phishers and sites that are not what they may seem.

But for Andalucia.com and any other website manager/owner, the benefits go far beyond this. Ad networks and sponsored reviews sites use Alexa rankings in determining how to pay for advertisements on your site and at other sites Alexa ranks; thus, the Alexa ranking carries some worth within the marketing industry.

With Alexa you can compare the traffic your competitors are receiving against your own, track sites linking into your site (as well as, of course, you competitors) and by using the toolbar, you can increase your own site’s Alexa ranking.

You can download the Alexa toolbar here and access the traffic details for your site by going to download.alexa.com. This is one toolbar that is definitely worth having.