Alexa.com offers a search engine, a directory and a toolbar (among other services). It also has a resource called Alexa Traffic Rankings. Alexa’s traffic estimates and ranks are based on the browsing behaviour of people in our global data panel which is a sample of all internet users.

How does it work?

Alexa’s Rankings is based on the traffic data provided by users in Alexa’s global data panel over a period of 3 months. Alexa does not give you the exact ranking of your site. It just only tells the rank according to the data which is collected from their toolbar. Alexa also uses amazon.com data to rank your site and also collect data from 3rd party software. Yes, this means that Alexa bases some, but not all, of its ranking system on its toolbar usage. Obviously, most average people visiting sites on the internet are not using Alexa Toolbar. So lowering your Alexa rank is not as simple as getting more traffic. You still need to get more traffic, but essentially, you need more traffic from readers who have the Alexa toolbar.
The ranks are updated daily and are determined by a bunch of factors such as,

• Number of unique visitors
• Page views per visitor
• Bounce rate

Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a website. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single Pageview.

Check your Blog’s or website’s Alexa Ranking

If your site’s metrics are Certified you can display Global and Country ranks for your site based on Certified Site Metrics, instead of metrics estimated from our data panel.

Ranks are for domains only (e.g., domain.com) and not for different pages of the same site unless they are personal home pages or blogs, like those hosted on sites like Blogger (blogspot.com). If a site is identified as a personal homepage or blog, it will have its own Traffic Rank, separate from its host domain.

Read more here: http://www.alexa.com/about

There are limits to statistics based on the data available. Sites with relatively low measured traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa. We do not receive enough data from our sources to make rankings beyond 100,000 statistically meaningful. (However, on the flip side of that, the closer a site gets to #1, the more reliable its rank.) This means that, for example, the difference in traffic between a site ranked 1,000,000 and a site ranked 2,000,000 has low statistical significance. Sites ranked 100,000+ may be subject to large ranking swings due to the scarcity of data for those sites. It is not unusual for such sites to decline to “No data” Traffic Ranks, or to improve suddenly.

How can you decrease your Alexa Ranking?

• Build backlinks. Backlinks work as a way of verifying that your site provides useful information to its viewers and this leads it to rank higher on the list.
• Claim your site on Alexa. This is a paid feature provided by Alexa but you can take the advantage of the 10 days free trial to boost up your rank.
•  Alexa gives priority to the sites that have Alexa widgets installed. Besides you can show your site’s Alexa rank and backlinks to your all visitors even if they don’t have Alexa toolbar installed in their browser.
• Install the Alexa Toolbar. Alexa counts only the visits that are made by Alexa toolbar installed on their browser. These type of visits are known as valid hits/visits to Alexa.

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