There are two easy ways to start using Alexa. If you are using Internet Explorer, visit this page and download the Alexa Toolbar.
If you’re using Firefox, download the SearchStatus extension which displays the Alexa Rank, Google PageRank as well as other useful features....
Some webmasters ensure that using a widget helps improving your Alexa rank because it would load with each page view and no matter whether your visitors have the toolbar/plugin installed or not. A widget would supply traffic data for Alexa to calculate your ranking.
Others webmasters says that widget does not help ranking. In fact, the Alexa website itself says traffic rankings come from the toolbar and never mentions the widget as a source of information. There are many bloggers and website authors who dispute this information....
The Alexa Toolbar is an application produced by Alexa Internet, is a Browser Helper Object for Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows that is used by Alexa to measure website statistics. It includes a popup blocker, a search engine entry box, a link to Amazon.com, a link to Alexa, information about the current Alexa ranking of the website that the user is visiting, and links relevant to the site the user is browsing. By early 2005 there had been over 10 million downloads of the toolbar, according to Alexa. But the company does not provide info on how many of them are actually used. According to one estimate made in March 2003, Alexa had a sample size of 180,000....
Alexa ranking is not accurate, and can be manipulated. Alexa data is based on a statistical sample consisting of website users who have downloaded the Alexa Toolbar. Alexa provides reach rank data for the day, previous week, and previous three months.
Alexa does not provide information about their total population of toolbar users, but an analysis of Alexa data reveals this information by other means. Many Alexa users are webmasters and marketing junkies. They install it on their own systems, and their own heavy use of their own pages causes their Alexa page rank to rise....
Alexa tracks a website's traffic history, and gives a ranking based upon the number of visitors using Alexa toolbar. We all know that Alexa ranking lacks in accuracy, but Alexa rank is important because:
There are lots of customers and advertisers who take Alexa rankings seriously, many “money maker program” still count this to determine how popular is our site. If you want to sell ad space of your website through services like Text-Link-Ads, you need a better Alexa Ranking and Google PR....
There are several disadvantage of Alexa ranking. is that depends on the Alexa toolbar.
Not everybody has the Alexa toolbar installed, so there might be millions of Web sites that, even if they have a lot of traffic, will not be ranked (or not high enough) by Alexa. It is rather relative....
The LOWER your rating on Alexa the better. The power in the Alexa ranking is your ability to tell if someone is telling the truth about their traffic levels, whether its good to purchase advertising space on a website and you want to see if they are really getting the unique hits they say they are. Alexa is also useful in rating one site compared to another, but the ranking can’t tell you much beyond that.
Ratings are based on a level from 1 to 4,000,000 and it goes beyond 4 mil sometimes. The LOWER your rating on Alexa the better. Meaning if you have a ranking under 100,000 then your website should be producing some good traffic. 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 ratings are for new sites mostly, or sites with no traffic basically....
Alexa rank depends on whether your visitors have the Alexa toolbar installed. This excludes traffic received from visitors that do not use their toolbar. Your website could have some thousand visitors a day, but if none have the Alexa toolbar, that visits not improve your Alexa ranking, it counts as zero visitors.
In order to boost your ranking you can download the Alexa toolbar and use it every day to visit your own website. You can download the toolbar here: Alexa toobar...