Why is the Alexa ranking of your website or blog so important?

[Locus-Uk]

Why is the Alexa ranking of your website or blog so important?

How reliable is the Alexa ranking system?

How can TrackAlexa.Com help?

According to Alexa, they gather web traffic statistics from web
surfers who have installed the Alexa Toolbar, or from website pages
that display an Alexa Widget.

This means, that visitors to your site that do not have the Alexa
Toolbar installed will not contribute to your Alexa ranking unless you
address this by adding a simple to install Alexa graphical widget to
your website's sidebar, header or footer. This way, when any of your
sites pages are visited a request is made to Alexa's system to
retrieve your site's current rank and at the same time Alexa will
record the request as a qualified visit to your site and your Alexa
rank will be adjusted accordingly.

All Alexa ranks are based on the preceding three months traffic data
collected and an average trend rank is calculated when comparing this
data against all other sites contained in the Alexa database.

The trend rank of any site is calculated according to the following
criteria:

1. Reach - the percentage of global internet users who visited the
site.

2. Pageviews - the percent of global pageviews the website received

3. Pageviews/user - a calculation of the pageviews per visitor to the
site

4. Bounce rate - the percentage of visitors to the site that closed
the site after visiting only a single page.

5. Time on site - an average calculation of the time spent on the site
by each visitor

6. Search percentage - the percentage of visits to the site that were
referred from a known search engine.

Alexa have recently stated that its toolbar has achieved over 10
million downloads worldwide, but I am unsure as to the duration this
claim refers to. I am confident to assume that a very large percentage
of toolbars will remain installed are being installed and therefore
continue to contribute to the accuracy of the Alexa ranking system.
But, this does however highlight the need for webmasters, who wish to
gain the best rank possible, to install an Alexa widget on their
sites.

Although not everyone in the web development industry believes that
Alexa is a reliable popularity ranking system, Alexa (an Amazon
company) remains at the forefront of the website ranking world and
receives worldwide recognition of this. I recently searched Google
with the keyword "website ranking", and the results were clear. It was
Alexa.Com who was at the top of the search results.

In contrast to Google Pagerank systems, the lower a site's Alexa rank
number, the higher the rank is. Google operate a system in reverse
where a higher number indicates a higher rank. At the time of writing
this article, Goole ranked no. 1 on Alexa's Top Sites list, closely
followed by Facebook, Youtube and Yahoo.

But, with all this said, what does having a high Alexa rank do for
your site?

Your site's Alexa rank is very important for recognition and website
monetization. Many website flipping businesses use Alexa rank to
assist when making a calculated decision regarding the financial
potential of a website on the open market. There are also websites
that provide website value estimations, and once again a website's
Alexa rank is used when making their calculations. Businesses such as
these feel that the Alexa rank to be a very useful tool in determining
the overall popularity of a site and in turn the potential financial
viability of the site.

A high Alexa rank could imply high traffic and this often attracts
advertisers when looking for potential advertising space. For those
looking to move into the affiliate marketing industry, a high Alexa
rank is often required by product and service sellers before they
allow membership to their affiliate programs. This way they feel
confident that their products or services are being advertised by
sites with good traffic and therefore a good reputation. Websites with
lower ranks are often rejected.

Tracking the movement of a site's Alexa rank is a very important
practice for any web developer or blog owner. By keeping a close eye
on the movement of the Alexa rank in relation to changes made to the
site, a web developer or blog owner can make informed judgements on
the effectiveness of changes or additions to the site and then act
accordingly. But Alexa.Com does not offer tracking facilities to any
websites that are ranked over 100,000 and as a result the only way to
track changes has been to visit Alexa.Com every day to obtain the
results yourself and record them in your own way. Perhaps as a
spreadsheet or in a note book.

I am very pleased to announce that a new tool has been developed that
does allow any site's Alexa rank to be tracked automatically and
recorded for 90 days. The tool will then display the results in a
graphical way as well as offer CSV data downloads. You can find this
new Alexa tracking tool at http://www.trackalexa.com.

In conclusion, although a million or two Alexa toolbar users and Alexa
widgets cannot give us an exact ranking on the popularity of every
website currently being served to the world wide web, the information
Alexa provides can give us a basic idea on the general traffic a site
receives and where the traffic is mostly being referred from. Alexa
rank is important to any website because it provides recognition,
increases the potential of monetization and provides important
information that will help web developers improve the quality of their
sites by improving the sites visitor experience. So tracking your
site's rank is exceptionally important and if you are not lucky enough
to have a rank higher than 100,000 you can now do this at http://www.trackalexa.com.

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/the-importance-of-your-sites-alexa-rank-5082090.html#ixzz1ToaP4Ygy
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution No Derivatives