Are You Familiar With Alexa.com For Ranking Websites?

[xwinuser]

I used to hope and expect Google's Page Rank to actually mean something to the average web designer but that never happened. It is still mainly an internal measure used by the Google developers.

 

However, Amazon.com has a child company / product in Alexa.com.

 

I have a love / hate relationship with Alexa. I am addicted to monitoring my site's rank on Alexa.com but I know the numbers are skewed because they mainly focus on the traffic of users with the Alexa Toolbar installed. Visitors who do not have the tool bar are hit or miss.

 

Therefore, I either have to offer my visitors the option to download the tool bar or hope that there are enough people who already have the tool bar to help me make an informed decision. And I guess there are enough with approximately 20 million users. Still I want the whole WWW.

 

FYI I do not offer the tool bar on my site. Its just not worth bothering people about and taking up my content.

 

The best way to get noticed by Alexa in addition to installing the tool bar is to claim your site at Alexa.com. Once you show up on their radar an average individual's website will usually rank in the high millions. The lower the score you have the better you are actually doing. Google is #1. 36,742. Not bad!

 

I only claimed my site on Alexa a few days ago so I am pleased that it went from 20 million to 10 million and now to 7 million in three days (knocked off 13 million).

 

Alexa also has a graph like you would see on a stock site or used to display many other statistics. Your site will not even show up on the graph until your rank goes below 100,000. Remember, the lower the better.

 

So why should you care about the Alexa rating? It is a well known ranking system among the SEO crowd and people who do marketing and advertising will want to partner with sites who have a high amount of unique visitors. The better you rank, the better your chances of finding an advertiser who will pay good money to be on your site (if you are in to that thing). If not, then it is probably a waste of your time but then again most hobbies are really.