Part VI - Getting Your Site Indexed in Alexa

Although Alexa's search results are driven by Google, this is a definite must in your search engine marketing plan.

The reason is that Alexa will provide statistics about your website that no other search engine or web directory will provide.

These statistics include:

*Your site ranking on the internet
*What sites are linking to yours
*Detailed traffic statistics
*Site thumbnails
*Site Speed

These are just a few examples.

You can also use Alexa to search for your keywords. This will tell you who your competition is for the keywords you have selected. You can more carefully study your competition, find out who is linking to your competition, and use what you learn to raise your rankings in the search engines, as well as find better keywords for your website.

Alexa also has its own crawler, and eventhough you may show up in the search results powered by Google, you still want to have Alexa crawl your site.

Alexa, like Google, may discover your site on its own. However, it's been my experience that Alexa only updates my site when I visit Alexa and make updates. This includes the thumbnails.

The first step that you should take before submitting to Alexa is to type in the domain name of your site to see if you are listed.

If you are listed, study the thumbnail for your site and see if needs to be updated. You should also check your site description, as well as contact information, and if it needs to be updated, update it.

Alexa will require that you verify your website in one of two ways. The first is to enter your email address, and Alexa will send you a confirmation email. The other way is that you can verified is to create an info.txt file and upload it to the root directory of your website. You can then click the verification link and Alexa will verify your site.

If your site isn't listed for some reason, you will need to submit. Alexa gives detailed instructions, as well as information on creating a robots.txt file.

You can get more information, as well as submit your site to be crawled, at this link: http://pages.alexa.com/help/webmasters/index.html.

If you want to find out who your competition is, and get a competitive edge, then Alexa is an indispensible tool to help you. Use the detailed information you'll find on this site, and you can easily raise your rankings in the search engines and get more traffic.