The internet is full of quantifiable, interesting, and useful metrics that can be incredibly helpful when measuring your progress with search engines and in rankings. There are dozens of usable metrics, some better and more helpful than others. One of the most confusing and unimportant in terms of SEO is the Alexa ranking. We try to dissuade our clients from wasting their time and money trying to win the Alexa game, but we’ve found that some of them just won’t let go.

However, even if what they ask for isn’t in any way helpful to them from an SEO standpoint, we always try to meet our client’s needs. So for all you die-hards out there, here are some tips on how to win the Alexa Challenge (an achievement that ranks somewhere below painting your face blue and running naked down Oxford Street in SEO terms). So, let’s start with an exploration of Alexa itself.

What is Alexa all about?

Alexa is not, as you might expect, the hip young woman the name seems to describe. Oh no. It is a metric that ranks your page in a completely helpful and wholly accurate way, charting the popularity of your website. And that’s the key. Alexa is all about how popular your site is among Alexa users. So if you’re in desperate need of quantifying how much a very select group of people like you, it’s perfect. But for SEO, it’s roughly the equivalent of a luxury car salesman trying to boost sales by clamouring to find out how popular his products are with a group of babies in prams – nothing to do with your target market, and utterly pointless.

That said, if there are people wanting to boost their Alexa rankings, we suggest the following:

1. Tattoo “I need to be loved” in large letters on your forehead

This is less a way of increasing your Alexa rank and more an alternative route that you could take. Since “I need to be loved” is the basic sentiment behind a maniacal need to boost your Alexa rank, a large tattoo will save you the effort. As you can imagine, a tattoo is not at all helpful with sales, and will probably put people off and actually reduce your sales figures. It’d be painful, cost money and have no effect in terms of SEO; exactly the same as going after a high Alexa ranking.

Ok, so you still want to increase your Alexa Rank? Try:

2. Getting statesmen to talk about you in connection with Alexa

One way of boosting your all important ranking with Alexa is to get statesmen to talk about your site in conjunction with the metric itself. Imagine how many Alexa users would flock to your site (and thus increase your Alexa ranking) if Barak Obama, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, Kofi Annan and Nelson Mandela all joined hands and sang songs about your Alexa ranking. It’d be a great day for your rank: more than a few people would download it, and then they’d all go to your site to see what the fuss was all about! A quick and easy way of boosting ranking to be sure. Admittedly your marketing costs might go up a tad, but the completely viable nature of this idea means that, similar to Alexa itself, it’s worth spending the time and money on from an SEO point of view. Sure it is. Honest.

3. Move to the Far East or Indian subcontinent

Moving to the Far East or Indian subcontinent might be a stretch, but what about just creating more content written in Mandarin, Japanese, or Hindi? It doesn’t matter all that much that customers to your site are most likely to have English as their first language – it’ll boost your Alexa ranking none the less. How? Well, since most users of Alexa are Mid or Far Eastern, it’s much more likely that they will look at (and therefore boost the ranking of) your site if you have content in the most used languages of the region. Other tips in the same line include: having an anime avatar picture of yourself on the site or in any blog you post on, and removing any references to Godzilla or other city destroying pests from your content. So, your site has become completely unintelligible to a vast swathe of your potential customers and has utterly collapsed from an SEO point of view? Ah, but it’s boosted your Alexa rank, and is therefore completely worth it.

4. Talk Techie

Do you know Pi to fifty places? Can you complete Halo 3 on insane in under three hours with no toilet breaks? Can you re-wire a computer to have the latest NVidia GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card, stop over logging, be upgraded to 16 GB memory and rewrite the BIOS all at the same time? No? Well, it might be an idea to learn, since a large proportion of people who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their computers are techies. This means that appealing to their tastes and displaying greater tech appeal will boost your Alexa rank exponentially. And it’ll make your site so much easier to understand for customers as well. Want to be popular with techies? Then Alexa is for you. If not, please step away and put up with potential customers instead.

5.Re-write Alexa to be in any way useful for SEO

Really it’s the only viable option if you’re serious about SEO. Otherwise, using Alexa as it is and claiming that it’s useful for SEO is a fairly transparent vanity exercise, and not worth taking part in.

This split second of humour was injected into the LeadGenerators Newsletter as a Christmas joke, but it’s got a serious point. Namely, that Alexa is one of the most useless metrics that you could use for measuring your SEO campaigns. Please don’t count on it for helpful SEO information or worry about it in terms of your own websites – it makes less difference to SEO than the colour of your hair or what you eat for dinner. James.