[Natasha]

Have you heard of the Alexa Toolbar?

Alexa uses sophisticated methods to track visitors to your site. It keeps note of which websites are linking over to yours. Then, it generates a number for you, a ranking of how popular your website is out of all the websites on the Internet. The lower your number, the better. The lower the ranking number of each of the websites linking to yours, the better YOUR Alexa ranking will be as well.

Some people say, "Whoa. Alexa says I only have X many visitors when I really have Y."

This happens for a few reasons.

1. Alexa is not updated every week or anything. It's updated every three months. It may not know about your website yet.

2. Alexa tracks visits more accurately than your hit tracker. Your website hit tracker may not distinguish between visits from search engine spider bots (they crawl the internet looking for websites and gather up information about websites to add them to their search results). It may not track IP addresses at all. I highly recommend you click here to read more about this on Alexa's blog.

3. Alexa only tracks visits by people who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser. If your best friend doesn't have the Alexa toolbar, her visits won't affect your Alexa ranking at all.

So, how can you boost your own ranking?

Download the Alexa toolbar, free! Then, your own visits to your website will boost your ranking. Simple
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Warmly,