Alexa website traffic ranking
Alexa website traffic ranking: what it is as well as why you ought to care (or otherwise).
Alexa is an Amazon possessed firm that is renowned for its public website traffic ranking solution using its alexa.com internet site.
Internet site promo overviews usually make a large offer regarding just how to boost your Alexa position due to the fact that a leading setting is typically linked with high earnings.
There are 3 numbers that Alexa records, reach, web page sights and also total ranking. If Alexa reports a reach of one, it suggests that on standard out of one million internet users one gos to your website.
The general Alexa ranking is a mix of the reach and also web page sights numbers such that the bigger both of them are the reduced the website’s ranking will certainly be; for Alexa, a smaller sized ranking suggests a much more vital internet site.
On a day-to-day basis, Alexa gathers data regarding the number of site visitors as well as web page sights for every site on the Internet.
When one of these individuals brows through as well as discovers a website, the toolbar sends this details to Alexa’s web servers.
The number is truly imprecise for websites with a little number of site visitors and also Alexa confesses that this is real for those websites not in the leading 100,000.
Slashdot.org is an innovation information website with a target market that is understood to be extremely anti-Microsoft; Slashdot’s slogan is “News for geeks.
Slashdot is recognized for something called the “Slashdot impact” that is when a tale on the front web page web links to a website, it obtains so several site visitors that the web servers
commonly are not able to manage the abrupt rise in website traffic. In various other words, I would certainly anticipate that Alexa’s ranking is really an underestimate of Slashdot’s real ranking.
From a data factor of sight, Alexa’s ranking can not be assumed of as an objective analytical action. The example of individuals utilized by Alexa for gathering information
is not an arbitrarily picked collection yet instead it is prejudiced in the direction of customers of Microsoft Windows as well as Internet
Explorer as well as those that are prepared to send as well as mount the toolbar to Alexa info regarding their searching actions.
If you truly desire precision in terms of your website’s number of customers as well as web page sights after that you are much better off utilizing analytics software program, for instance Google Analytics,
instead than Alexa. Numerous marketers make use of Alexa’s ranking as a neutral 3rd celebration price quote of a website’s appeal; they speak with Alexa in order to identify just how much advertising and marketing room is worth on your website.
The total Alexa ranking is a mix of the reach as well as web page sights numbers such that the bigger both of them are the reduced the website’s ranking will certainly be; for Alexa,
a smaller sized ranking suggests a much more vital web site. The number is truly unreliable for websites with a tiny number of site visitors as well as Alexa confesses that this is real for those websites not in the leading 100,000.
The example of individuals utilized by Alexa for accumulating information is not an arbitrarily picked collection however instead it is prejudiced in the direction of individuals of Microsoft Windows as well as Internet Explorer as well as those that are eager
to send as well as set up the toolbar to Alexa info concerning their searching actions. If you truly desire precision in terms of your website’s number of individuals as well as web page sights after that you are far better off utilizing analytics software application, for instance Google
Analytics, instead than Alexa. Numerous marketers utilize Alexa’s ranking as a neutral 3rd celebration price quote of a website’s appeal; they speak with Alexa in order to identify just how much marketing room is worth on your website.
Who is Alexa and what does she have to do with me?
Traffic is the most important thing to any web based entrepreneur. And Alexa pretty much has a monopoly on that data. Ignore her at your own peril.
Alexa reminds the Computer Man Website Design Team of the teaching of Jesus Christ speaking of the rulers and powers of His time as recorded in the Holy Bible, Matthew 23:4,
New American Standard Bible, “They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger”.
Sure sounds like the few who control internet content to the old Tennessee Mountain Man.
Want to get an Alexa ranking that matters for your website? You should because all other directories, indexes and search engines stop by their website to see who you are and whether or not you are a mover and shaker in your internet niche.
Alexa may well be the world wide web’s Dunn and Bradstreet. If you know anything about business, business finances, the Better Business Bureau or the Chamber of Commerce or have had to deal with your broker or banker on business matters you know the importance and the drill.
Sounds daunting, doesn’t it? Sure it does, and what makes it worse is Alexa‘s hypocrisy. Like the credit bureaus, Alexa collects, keeps and reports information about you and your website, but it keeps no data on its’ own traffic.
The first question asked by your prospective partners, marketers, and promoters is what is your Dunn and Bradstreet… oops sorry, Alexa rating.
Alexa, located at the Presidio of San Francisco, CA, was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat. It offered a toolbar that gave Internet users guidance on where to go next, based on the traffic patterns of its user community. Say what?
Yes, this cousin of Big Brother thinks it knows better what you want or need than you do. And, they select who best provides that for you. Based on what? Based on their user traffic.
Who do they think they are, and how do I become a part of this crucial community of the web elite?
They are the people who offer context for each site visited: to whom it was registered, how many pages it had, how many other sites pointed to it, and how frequently it is updated. Engineers at Alexa, in cooperation with the Internet Archive, created the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
The nonprofit organization established to preserve Web sites by taking regular “snapshots”. The Wayback Machine provides links to older versions of a webpage. Alexa also supplies the Internet Archive with web crawls.
Amazon dot com acquired Alexa in 1999 for approximately $250 million in Amazon stock.
Alexa entered a partnership with Google in 2002, and with the Open Directory Project about a year later in 2003. Live Search replaced Google as their provider of search results in the summer of 2006. Then in the autumn of that same year they began using their own Search Platform.
Then in December they released Alexa Image Search. Built in-house, it is the first major application to be built on their Web Platform. Today, Alexa is primarily a search engine, an Open Directory based web directory, and a general supplier of site information to all suitors.
In late 2005, Alexa opened its extensive search index and web-crawling facilities to third party programs through a comprehensive set of web services and APIs. These could be used, for instance, to construct vertical search engines that could run on Alexa‘s own servers or elsewhere.
Unique to the internet, Alexa‘s Web Search Platform gives developers access to their raw crawl data reinforcing their comparison with Dunn and Bradstreet.
Alexa, like every other web based endeavor feeling the bandwidth pinch changed their API to require comparisons be limited to 3 sites, reduced size embedded graphs be shown using Flash, and mandatory embedded BritePic ads in the early summer of 2007.
So who is Alexa and what does she have to do with me? Alexa is the ultimate remote helpdesk. Accessible only as a self help desk, she is the real gatekeeper.
Her stats help determine your Google Page Rank, and Firefox’s About This Site are all Alexa metadata. Everyone else also pretty much reports what is in her data base.
You know those stats you depend so much on? Irrespective of who supplies them to you… chances are they got them from Alexa.
To join the club browse to Alexa dot com and follow the webmaster instructions. Don’t forget the Alexa Tool Bar! It matters! Alexa averages your raw traffic
over a three month period to determine your traffic flow and where you rate. Under 100,000 visitors a month over any consecutive three month period and you drop off the radar.
Google Is Taking Descriptions From Alexa!
In a recent study looking at the “descriptions” of website search engine listings, we have noticed that your main SERP listing is being manipulated by Alexa.com.
If you take your top key word search engine placement within Google and look at your website’s description, you will notice something similar with other websites, the descriptions match those taken from Alexa.com!!!
Take a peek for yourself.
1 – Search for your top key word in Google (usually the first key phrase within your title tag).
2 – Now copy & paste this description in a note pad or word doc.
3 – Once you have this, go to: www.alexa.com
4 – Type in your “url” in the address bar
5 – Look at the description from Google and the description from Alexa, they should be an exact match.
NOTE: If you do not have a description in Alexa, Google will come up with its own version but in reality, wouldn’t you want to be in control of your website’s description within the SERP’s?
Not having a description in Alexa – Could it directly affect your Google search engine results?
ABSOLUTELY ! ! !
I would suggest looking at your description in Alexa to make sure that it directly targets your top key phrase that you want performing well within Google.
Your Alexa description could very well determine better SERPS within Google! Google feeds results into Alexa which in turn updates information on website ranking. They are partnered up, why wouldn’t they use each others results?!
Alexa‘s Description is the “text book” definition:
I don’t blame Google for wanting to use these descriptions. Most descriptions in Alexa are the “text book version” of your company’s description and are usually well written, and well thought out.
This would give Google an advantage so that they can spend less time on delivering quality descriptions and more time delivering better results within their searches.
I really like this idea because if this were true across the board, Google would be giving the individual website owner more freedom to write a proper description for their SERPS
without using it to spam or create false information. Again, it would have to be approved by Alexa‘s team anyways, they probably wouldn’t allow key word stuffing for their site as it is.
Alexa Toolbar – The Ultimate Internet Tool
There are numerous tools available on the Internet to assist online businesses. A valuable tool that you should use is the Alexa Toolbar. Even better, this tool is free.
Alexa Toolbar
Founded in April 1996, Alexa.com was designed to provide an interactive web navigation system. The most impressive part of the platform, now owned by Amazon.com, is the free Alexa Toolbar.
First released in 1997, the Alexa Toolbar is known as the “B.S.” detector for Internet sites. With over 10 million users, the toolbar tracks how people use the
Internet and turns this information into ranking statistics for each site on the Internet. For instance, Yahoo is ranked as the number one most visited site on the Internet.
So how do you use this tool? First, you download the Alexa Toolbar as follows:
1. Go to Alexa.com.
2. Click “Download Alexa Toolbar” at the top of the page.
3. Click “Install” on the next page.
Reload the page you are viewing and the toolbar will appear across the top of your browser. The tool provides you with valuable information regarding any site you are looking at, including your own.
It tells you the traffic ranking of the site compared to all sites on the Internet. The tool also provides you specific traffic information for the site and lays out sites that are similar to the one on your screen.
Instead of making baseless assumptions regarding how “good” a site is or whether it is successful, you can use the Alexa statistics to get a better idea.
If any company approaches you claiming they have a lot of traffic, you can just pull up their site and review the Alexa statistics. This allows you to verify who is receiving a significant amount of traffic and who is feeding you a line of “B.S.”
Let’s look at Google.com using the Alexa toolbar. Load Google on to your browser and click the #3 number in the toolbar. The Alexa Toolbar information for google shows:
1. The site is the 3rd most popular site on the Internet. [Yahoo is No. 1.]
2. The site takes .8 seconds to load, which is very fast.
Next, click the “see traffic details” link on the page to dive into the site statistics:
The site shows consistent traffic through the year, maintaining a number 3 position. 214,00 out of every million surfers visit the site, which is an excellent “reach” rating.
Each visitor views approximately 5.4 pages on the site, which means that users are working there way into the internal pages of the site. This is always good news for a site.
As you can see, using the Alexa Toolbar system can provide you with specific information regarding web sites. The next time you are contacted by
someone claiming they have millions of hits or are considering advertising on a site, you can use the Alexa toolbar to get an objective view of the site.
Exploring Google Page Rank And Alexa Rank
So, you’ve heard a few things about SEO and now you are trying to learn some more about what SEO actually is and what your goals actually are.
Well, your main two goals in SEO are to increase your websites position in the search engine results pages(SERP’s) and increase website traffic.
Google Pagerank represents how important your website is compared to all other websites and Alexa Rank is how many visitors your website gets in relation to all other websites on the Internet.
You are aiming to get a high Google Pagerank (commonly refered to as PR) and a low Alexa Rank.
What looking at these two measured elements does is give you some idea of how well, or how badly, your website is doing in comparison to all other websites. Lets explore these two rankings in a little more detail.
What is Google Page Rank?
The co-founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, describe Google Page Rank as a tool designed to rank a website that is listed in the Google search index.
A Pagerank of a web page is given on a scale of 0-10. 0 is the lowest possible score for a website and conversely a 10 is the highest score possible. A high Pagerank is defined by the amount, importance(PageRank) and relevance of web pages that link to the web page in question.
When a web page links to another web page, Google consider that to be a vote for the page in question and therefore of some importance.
There is a formula associated to how PageRank is calculated but for the purposes of this article it is too indepth, but if you are interested in the theory behind PageRank (PR) then a quick search on Google will provide fruitful.
What is Alexa Rank?
The Alexa Rank is different to Google PR; Alexa rank websites based solely on traffic to the website. Alexa rank websites in descending order towards 0, where the most highly
visited website on the Internet is given a rank of 0. At this point in time the top three ranked websites (most visitors) on Alexa are, 0 – Yahoo,
1 – Google and
2 – MySpace. According to Alexa these
3 websites get the most traffic on the Internet. Alexa Rankings vary from 1 to a billion. Every web site in the world is included in the Alexa Rank, so the scale on your Alexa ranking is constantly changing in relation to other websites on the Internet.
Alexa
Why on earth would anyone want to install a piece of spyware onto their Web browser? No sensible right minded person would …unless you are a webmaster and you want to improve your SERPS ranking that is.
The Alexa toolbar is not “technically” spyware as it doesn’t retrieve any private or personal information. It does however log all the sites you visit and as webmasters we can use this to our advantage.
It uses this information to compile traffic ranking statistics and a relational list. The relational list is very useful as it shows what other sites people who have looked the current website have also visited.
Alexa is owned by Amazon and it is possible to make your own Alexa toolbar with your Amazon affiliate code included. You can then place this on your
site and get credited when anyone buys through Amazon using the Amazon button on the toolbar you’ve distributed, it is also possible to include a link to your site in the toolbar.
Alexa ranks sites from 1 to 5,000,000 and sometimes higher. Ranking 1 has the most traffic and so on, anything below 250,000 and you should be getting some decent traffic levels.
This information can be used to determine how well your advertising campaigns are going and how traffic levels are growing over a period of time.
This information can also be used to determine how you rivals are doing and keep you one step ahead of them. The Alexa information is also picked up by other search engines so you benefit from an increase in you SERPS as your site progresses up the rankings .
One drawback of the Alexa toolbar is that it only works on Internet Explorer and not the tool of choice for most webmasters Firefox.
However I personally feel this is a small price to pay for the benefits I get when using the tool bar for research and to check my sites daily.
Checking the stats of your own site has a positive impact on your Alexa ranking as the toolbar is not generally used by the general public so every extra hit from a browser with the tool bar installed is valuable.
I have 1 site that is almost exclusively used by webmasters , As webmasters are the people who use Alexa more than any other group 500 page views a day are enough to get this site into the top
500,000 Another site that has 3 times the traffic but the visitors are mostly the general public so this site is languishing in the 2,000,000 ‘s.
Why not try an experiment for a month, Download the toolbar and monitor one of your sites, once you see the data you get and the way it can be used you won’t know how you survived without it.
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