It's pretty clear by now: Alexa is a marketing tool, and many people are aware of this.

Most advertisers and ad networks use your Alexa ranking as a measure of your website traffic. Actually, to most of them, this is the main gauge. This makes Alexa a powerful marketing tool for your site.

Now webmasters and editors are wondering how to take advantage of it. Therefore pages explaining how to increase your Alexa web ranking, or even how to game it, are gaining more and more attention: if you perform a Google search for "Alexa" and "Ranking" you'll find tons of sites explaining many ways in which you can better perform on Alexa.

But there's a more subtle explanation to this phenomenon. One which can help explain how to really succed in your goals. And which explains why so many blog posts' title read like this:" How to increase your Alexa ranking" or this: "Ultimate guide to gaming Alexa (for free)". They make up the title of this post not by chance. Read further for more details...

ALEXA FACTS (AND SOME TIPS):

1) Alexa receives data only from those users who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their pc: this is a fact, read this for further details.

2)Alexa gathers data mainly from webmasters and webmarketers: people who want to optimize their Alexa score are the more likely to be Alexa users, infacts they want to monitor their website performance and, in the meantime, they want to understand how Alexa reacts to their actions. As a result, many Alexa toolbar users are website editors and designers.

3) An increase in the traffic coming from those users will result in a higher increase in your Alexa performance: if you speak to an undistinguished audience and you have 100 people visiting your site, you might find out that only one of them has an Alexa toolbar. Therefore Alexa will be aware of that visit only. But if you target your communication to webmasters and webmarketers it might result in less visits (say 10) and more Alexa hits (I would say 2). Which happens to be a 100% increase in your Alexa performance.

4) Simple but still true: Alexa users - since they are mostly webmasters and webmarketers and they're aware of the importance of ranking well on Alexa - share one main common interest; guess what it is... Alexa of course! And what is the most interesting Alexa-related subject for these guys? That's clear: "How to increase your Alexa ranking" of course!

At this point you probably got it right: by writing a post about how to increase your Alexa ranking you already are doing it.

Today I made improvements on the listing templates for all company details.

The space got a bit wider to cover longer names and addresses and the business option "press" has been added to the menu. Now companies can also link to their press releases submitted on http://press.sjn.com.

The InSite-Search template has been designed to match the box as well as the comments template to send requests.

Today we tried to fix an issue in the charsets in the German RSS feed.

Additionally we did some improvement to the SJN Press templates and we improved the implementation of the feeds in the country pages.

We started to test a geotargeting for the country specific domains. But befor the roll-out we want to see how Google treats our sites (since it is a Java Script).

Over the weekend we did some maintenance on our European database. Searching was partially disabled but now everything is up to normal speed.

On the German version www.sjn.de some new categories have been added and new links to magazines have been added in the maincategories.

We implemented a try-out of Search123's sponsored results as well.

Nach einem Jahr Arbeit aus Konzeptionierung, Programmierung und Design, geht nun endlich die neue sjn.de-Seite online.
Zwar noch etwas im Rohzustand, aber wenigstens ist nun die Software soweit am Laufen.
Ich freue mich auf Ihre Meinung