What You Need to Know About Alexa Rankings
As a rule of thumb, I don’t pay attention to Alexa rankings. Primarily, it’s because we deal with mostly small business, so their rankings aren’t going to land them under the 100,000 range. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
What does the Alexa ranking mean? Alexa measures your traffic (and popularity) by way of their toolbar (not unlike Keyword Discovery), and measures your site accordingly. The lower the number, the better. To give some perspective, the Maine SEO blog’s Alexa ranking is 1,051,645. Flyte has an Alexa rank of 140,350; CNN’s is 52, Google’s is 1.
Alexa also provides some Google Analytics-esque statistics which aren’t nearly as accurate, including: pageviews, bounce %, time on site, and incoming links.
I don’t suggest using Alexa because you can get more relevant statistics using tools like Google Analytics and Yahoo Site Explorer.
However, Alexa can be helpful if you’re comparing several large websites. Alexa makes it easy to compare popular websites to gain some quick insight on their differences:
And if you absolutely insist on using it…
- Remember that, like most search stat tools, these numbers are relative
- Realize that you can get far more accurate statistics using your Analytics
- Recognize Alexa rank is not unlike PageRank: where it’s easy to become too focused on where you are today compared to yesterday
Nicki Hicks
SEO Stat Scrutinizer – try saying that five times fast
Tags: Alexa, Analytics, measurement, Rankings