How to add Alexa Rank Widget to improve Website Ranking?
How to add Alexa Rank Widget to improve Website Ranking?
If you find Alexa rankings really important, you might want to consider displaying your rank directly on your website by adding an Alexa widget.
A higher Alexa ranking is lucrative for advertisers and webmasters to take your website seriously. So why not take that opportunity to show the ranking directly on your website?
Displaying Alexa rank widget in your WordPress website is really easy. I will walk you through few different ways that you can add the widget to your website.
If you are already familiar with Alexa and its ranking, you might want to skip the introductory section and find the code or plugins that you need for your website below.
For those who are still researching on the topic, let’s start with some basic introduction on Alexa ranking and if you should really consider adding the widget.
Alexa ranking is a traffic rank position for a list of websites as published by Alexa. The website is owned by Amazon and presents itself as an information company that offers website information and analytics.What is Alexa Ranking – Alexa Traffic Rank?
The company uses a sample of Internet users that it claims to be representative of all Internet users to estimate the ranks.
Alexa ranking, however, can be biased, and there are so many articles on the web claiming that the Alexa rankings aren’t perfect.
There’s certainly truth in such claims and you might want to understand how Alexa calculates rankings while taking them into consideration.
To solve problems around such issues, Alexa in recent years has introduced certified rankings to make the ranking more accurate. To have a certified rank webmasters, however, are required to subscribe the costly Alexa plans.
You can visit the detailed article from Alexa to know how the traffic rankings are determined.
Now that you have some idea of what the rankings can mean, let’s move onto how you can show the rankings on your blog or website.
Alexa Rank Widget – HTML code
Adding Alexa rank widget is as simple as adding any text widget in WordPress. Alexa officially provides HTML code that you can add to your sidebar or any widget areas in your blog.
You can either display just your Alexa Rank or your Alexa rank including a count of the sites that link to your website.
Here’re the required HTML codes for both widgets.
1. Only Alexa Rank
using an Alexa widget like this you can display your site's Alexa rank on your site:
Just change yoursite.com to your website in two places in the HTML snippet below, and then copy and paste it into your website's HTML:
<a href="http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yoursite.com"><script type="text/javascript" src="http://xslt.alexa.com/site_stats/js/t/a?url=yoursite.com"></script></a>
Here is a widget that displays both your site's Alexa rank and Sites Linking In count:
<a href="http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yoursite.com"><script type="text/javascript" src="http://xslt.alexa.com/site_stats/js/s/a?url=yoursite.com"></script></a>
Obviously, you will need to change the WPism.com in above code snippets to your website URL.
To add it to WordPress, you will simply need to add a Text Widget in the required place.
Instructions: Go to Appearance > Widgets and Drag the Text Widget from available widgets to the location you want to display your Alexa Rank. Copy and paste the above code in the widget.
Detailed Instructions to Add Alexa Rank Widget
- From your WordPress dashboard, go to Widgets under Appearance section.
- Click on the Arbitrary text or HTML widget and add it to your desired widgets section.
- Copy and paste the above code in the HTML widget.
- Change the URL in the above code to your own website URL.
- Click on Save and your Alexa Rank Widget should now appear on your Website.
Adding Alexa Rank by WordPress Plugins
That previous method of simply adding HTML codes should be the best option but if you are looking for plugins to achieve this, there’re few plugins that can help you with it.
I will cover one of the plugins that seem to be frequently updated and used by a number of people.
Alexa Rank Widget WordPress Plugin
This simple widget just allows you to add the Alexa rank widget in your sidebar. All you have to do is drag the widget to the sidebar or footer you want to display and fill your website URL.
The plugin provides two options to display the Alexa widget
- Square – Button (120 x 95)
- Vertical – Vertical Banner (120 x 240)
Instructions: Once you download and Install the plugin, go to Appearance >Widgets and Drag the Alexa Rank Widget from the available widgets.
Can the Alexa widget improve your ranking?
One important part of this article, before we conclude, is if displaying the Alexa widget can improve your ranking.
I have seen several webmasters displaying their rankings on their blog, but I don’t have a definite answer if it actually impacts the ranking. I have seen blogs with good rank using the widget, and I might be biased to suggest from such pieces of evidence.
Alexa in one of its blog post has mentioned that installing an Alexa widget to improve your rank is actually a myth and that the widget is not used to measure traffic.
One thing that I have learned from my experience is that it actually can influence your ranking if people are clicking on your widget and landing on to your Alexa page.
Although it won’t make your ranking certified, Alexa can have more data to have some valid estimates for your ranking. Again, I would recommend going through how Alexa calculates its ranking in details.
But hey if you have a good ranking, it can surely be a plus point for you to display the rank on your website.
As Google Page rank has been discontinued, we are only left with few public ranking options that are reliable. Alexa and Compete Traffic ranks might be the only options that we are left with.
Do you use Alexa ranking widgets? I would love to hear your view on the Alexa rankings in comments below.
No comments: