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Do the Alexa Dance aka a review of Alexa reviews

I won't name names, or link links as it were, but ever since I discovered my own Alexa ranking(s) I have been obsessed with understanding how to optimize them - and as a matter of course I have read quite a few blogs about it. Without succumbing to the cliche of promising '20 Ways to Game Your Ranking', I will share what I know.

The only people that matter are the users that have installed the Alexa toolbar from http://www.alexa.com/site/download.

The traffic to your site of these users with the toolbar installed over the last 3 months is what determines your rank. So at the most basic level, the logical thing to do is bump up marketing (really?) and hope that a good percentage of those new clicks are Alexa users. This may be effective, but it is also wasteful to some degree.

It is also worth noting that the Alexa user base reputedly skews very much towards webmasters, so another good way to attract a stronger percentage of Alexa users relative to your total user base is to target content towards webmasters, like a laser. You zap in their clicks with post titles like '20 Sure Fire Tips on How to Be An Alexa Jedi' or 'I Made It Into the Alexa Top 1000 - In Only 10 Minutes!'. Of course you also need to have real stuff for them to read, or else the Jedi jokes can get your Force cut off. Anyway, my angle is that I work with Ruby on Rails, I post about Ruby On Rails, and I am a webmaster - so there's your targeted audience.

That being said, I have started a new category (http://www.digbox.net/index.php/alexa/) to track my newfound obsession. And if you are reading this and haven't already installed your very own toolbar then you don't deserve to be reading this, and I'll probably cry myself to sleep tonight. I hope you're happy.

Tune in next week for more observations.Original post blogged on codeboxer.com.