What’s Alexa? It’s an internet statistics monitoring company, owned by Amazon.com. They provide a toolbar (which was once commonly considered spyware, less so now) which when installed, reports  traffic data back to Alexa.

Which means? Alexa issue all websites a traffic rating based on this information – you can see mine at the bottom of the right sidebar. The lower the number, the better.

Why should I care? You should only really pay attention if you sell ads or write paid posts etc. Most advertisers use your Alexa stats in determining what to pay you. The better the rating, the more cash you get.

But the Alexa stats are only based on a tiny sample of web users and are hopelessly unrealistic. I know that, you know that, but I’ll leave it to you to argue with the advertisers. They’re as realistic as TV ratings, and look how many great shows have got cancelled….

OK, I’m convinced, show me how. Sure, I’ll just cut and paste this whole post from Dosh-Dosh and…. Oh, I’ll be good, go read it here: 20 Quick Ways To Increase Your Alexa Ranking. It really is worth reading, as is the rest of the blog for that matter.

I’ll be trying out a few of these: I already have the Alexa widget thanks to Matt at eJabs, but I don’t have any reviews yet, so I would be grateful ;-) Glowing would be nice, I’ll settle for fair. I shall also review any blogs I see with Alexa widgets on, so if you add one to your blog, let me know.

I’ll let you know how my stats get on….