I have been wandering around the generally internets for the past 5 years and have started to notice a general trend. Those of us with internet properties, such as blogs, and websites seemed to be increasingly feaverish around several numbers. Among those are Alexa rankings, Google Page Rank and your traffic statistics.
Alexa seem to be the current low man on the totem pole. They have so little influence on the blogging world that they may go by the wayside the way technorati did. Alexa currently only ranks vistiors if they use Alexas toolbar, or you add one of Alexa’s buttons to your site. This just creates havoc for the real visitors, 98% of whom do not use the Alexa toolbar! If you do want your Alexa ranking to increase I suggest you go to Alexa and use their site widgets. Every visitors to your site will count and you will see your Alexa rankings drop down several thousand in a few short weeks.
Next comes the difficult measure, Page Rank. Page Rank involves a complex mathematical forumla, which basiclly means that unless you have a PhD in mathematics, you will not understand it. Not to worry though as the general gist of it is that the more backlinks to your site, the higher Page Rank you get. I could get very technical about all the bad things you can do for your Page Rank(but for the lack of a better word, it is boring), so I discourage you from giving out too many links yourself as that makes it even more difficult to move on the Page Rank ladder.
Page Rank goes on a scale of 0 to 10. 0 being the lowest and 10 the highest, only a few sites have a PR 10, among those are mostly government websites. You can go to several blogging community forums and ask for links(be nice and give a link back. 
). However, doing this in general on webmaster forums will get you frowned upon.
In the intrest of time this concludes today’s lesson on rankings. I will pick up next time on your site rankings due to the fact that this article is probably longer than the great wall of China. Good luck with your sites and see you on the flip side!