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 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.

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