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August 7, 2007

Get your Wheels Rolling and Learn How Alexa Ranking Affects Your Traffic!

Filed under: Search Engine Marketing — Andrew Christiansen @ 3:27 pm

How Alexa Ranking Affects Your Traffic should be duly noted in your website search engine optimization strategies.  Alexa (www.alexa.com), is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, and is a popular website and toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox users that includes SEO tools.  Users are part of the “Alexa Community” that is the source of the data acquired by Alexa.  The toolbar offers tools to users that include links to related sites, website traffic, and detailed product and webpage information.  Alexa users are the ones you can reach when they click on a website similar to yours, and your website appears in Alexa’s “Related Links Results.” 

According to the Alexa, their users have visited 11.2 million unique websites.  By learning how Alexa Ranking affects your traffic, you can build your search engine optimization applications to not only end up in the users search engine results page, but also connect with other webmasters to build successful link-building relationships.  Many of the Alexa users are webmasters monitoring or manipulating their own traffic statistics with Alexa tools.  Traffic counts are reputed to be easily manipulated by downloading the Alexa toolbar and visiting your website. However, traffic counts are determined by “Reach” and “Page” views.  Reach measures the number of users, and page measures the number of visits, but multiple visits from the same user on the same day are only counted as one.  Alexa values consistency, and higher value is given to steady traffic than traffic with sudden upswings.

Another factor Alexa takes into consideration is their “Sites Pointing” statistic.  This is an area that you can develop to see how Alexa Ranking can affect traffic to your website.  Four to six times a year, Alexa crawls the web looking for links.  For every website that has a link to your website, you receive one point for “Site Pointing In.”  The Alexa Ranking system counts webpages with links to your site, not the number of links.  This means if there are multiple links to your site on one page, these will only count as one point.  Keep links relevant.  Alexa keeps track of user trends, behavior and preferences.  A link that is never clicked on will end up void.

Other search engines take notice of Alexa, especially Google.  And what Google looks at, everyone looks at - and you want your website looked at.  So, pay attention to how Alexa Ranking affects your traffic.  Your competitors are using Alexa to monitor you with Alexa’s useful SEO tools to compare traffic.  However, If your ranking is below 100,000, your data will most likely not be included in results. Alexa’s rankings are based on far a website is from number one, and it also only ranks domain names and not subpages.
 
By association with Alexa, you also get a big boost in publicity by their parent company, Amazon.com.  When an Alexa viewer visits your site, it gets linked to their Amazon.com profile where other viewers can visit and see your site.  It pays to learn how Alexa Ranking can affect your traffic - so get your wheels rolling and get your website profiled in Alexa’s information highway.


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