|
What I like about Alexa is the ability it gives me to track the
links to my site, that I may not know about.
What You Should Know About Alexa Rankings
by E. Hunt
What You Should Know About Alexa Rankings
Want to sell your website and get the most money for it?
Or maybe you would like to augment your website's income by selling
advertising on it? Or you just want to get a good feel for how well
your search engine optimization efforts are working. Then you need to
know about Alexa Rankings.
Like it or not (and many people are highly critical of
the Rankings), Alexa Rankings are the most frequently used statistic to
evaluate a site's popularity and traffic. Unlike Google's Page Rank,
which only evaluates specific webpages, Alexa Traffic Rankings apply to
an entire website.
Alexa's Traffic Rankings come as a function of what
Alexa calls "reach", as well as their calculated "page views". Both
statistics come from data supplied by users who have the Alexa Toolbar
installed. Alexa indicates that over 10 Million people have downloaded
their toolbar. Downloading the Alexa Toolbar has appeal since it
includes a popup blocker (long before the major browsers did) as well
as a search engine entry box, links to both Amazon and Alexa, and the
Alexa information about a site.
After the "reach" (percent of users accessing the site),
and page views (number of unique pages accessed by a user during one
day), the Traffic Rankings are calculated and Alexa's list of most
popular sites is created. The site with the highest ranking is listed
as #1, the second highest is #2 and so on.
Criticism of the Alexa Toolbar and Alexa Rankings arise
from the Toolbar's intrusive, privacy-breaking toolbar and the Alexa
Rankings' bias. Indeed, some spyware programs flag the Toolbar as
problematic.
Bias of the Rankings comes from the fact that the data
only comes from users of the Toolbar. While the Toolbar exists for the
Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Netscape browsers, and for users
of Windows, Macintosh and Linux, some notable Internet users are not --
such as users of the AOL/Netscape browser.
It's commonly, but incorrectly, thought that bias occurs
because the Toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer. Even
before Alexa came out with their own Toolbar for Firefox, other Firefox
extensions existed that provided the same data collection function.
However, it's unknown how many people actually use the
Toolbar. The Wikipedia article on the Alexa Toolbar references a 2003
forum posting estimating the actual number of Toolbar users at 180,000.
While some have talked about the Alexa Rankings being a
statistical sampling like TV's Nielsen Ratings, perhaps the only thing
they have in common is that they are both samplings, and larger
estimations of popularity are based upon those samplings. Nielsen, in
the finest tradition of polling and statistical sampling, carefully
selects their "Neilson homes". Alexa not only does not do this, the
users self-select themselves.
Additionally, Alexa indicates that any Alexa Ranking
below 100,000 is unreliable, as is any site with fewer than 1000
visitors per month. According to Alexa, "the more traffic a site
receives (the closer it gets to the number 1 position), the more
reliable its Traffic Ranking becomes."
Ken Evoy, founder of the website building and hosting
company Site Build It!, extols the virtues of Alexa Rankings, in spite
of admitting that there is a great deal of "scatter". That is, it's
quite possible that a site with only 20 visitors a day might have an
Alexa Ranking of 150,000, and a site with 5000 visitors a day with a
Ranking of 500,000. He bases his appreciation on the Alexa Rankings
that 62% of his customers have been able to achieve traffic rankings
within the top 3%.
So, how can you increase your Alexa Traffic Rank? Most
obviously, get more traffic. This can be done by search engine
optimization (SEO) efforts as well as by a myriad of other
traffic-generating strategies.
However, you can also bump your Ranking by taking
advantage of Alexa Ranking weaknesses. For instance, encourage all your
website visitors to download and install the Alexa Toolbar. Visit your
own website! Alexa doesn't know it's your website, so has no way of
eliminating this bias. There are also a number of software tools and
scripts that can be used, ranging from $49 to free (Alexa Booster is a
popular one), to code written into forum postings.
While Alexa is facing competitors such as Compete.com
and Quantcast, its Rankings are well-entrenched in the industry. While
there may be reasonable questions about their validity, if you need to
impress someone with the popularity and traffic of your site, paying
attention to Alexa Rankings still is important. The best way to
increase your Alexa Ranking is by simply getting more traffic. However,
other means of increasing your Alexa Ranking should not be ignored.
Visit http://www.alexa-secrets.com/
for SEO products and services that will help improve your site's
ranking.
About the Author
E. Hunt, owner Alexa-Secrets.com
There are various ways to achieve higher ranking with Alexa. |