Alexa is a very powerful tool, used to rank website traffic. The relationship between how Alexa rates your website and how popular your website is, however, isnt as obvious as it might seem. You need to consider your websites ranking, links, traffic, and many other factors. Many of these factors are hidden and known only to the most experienced Alexa users.
Do other websites link to yours If you want Alexas attention then you should make sure that they do. Dont worry: usually, all you need to do is ask, as long as you offer a link to their site in return. Remember that your links need to be relevant to your site dont take links from an unrelated site, as they wont be counted. However, if the links are on sites that dont get much traffic, then Alexa will never hear about them.
The fact of the matter is that relevant links are helpful to your visitors. Search engines want to know if a site is worth going to. If it is, they are happy to index it in a higher spot. This is a general rule of thumb that you should keep in mind at all times when performing SEO operations. The difference between a site with a moderate search results and a site with high search results is that the site with the higher results is generally more user friendly. Alexa Ratings and other rating systems try to emulate how a visitor will see your site. Once theyve determined the worth of your site to a visitor they index it accordingly. This is why it is so important to have relevant links. If you are linking to sites that your users would find interesting, Alexa will enjoy it.
By targeting sites that are similar to yours, but not exactly the same, youll get relevant links that Alexa will like. The best sites to link to are with content that complements your own. For example, if your site is dedicated to rock and roll and you link to a guitar sales web site, youll probably get traffic flow back and forth. One way of ensuring relevant information is to link to yourself from other sites that you own: why try to hunt down other webmasters if you have 20 or 30 websites of your own you can use Traffic flow is the biggest factor, however, as most of what Alexa does is traffic-based.
After comparing your site to the other ones it ranks, Alexa will assign your site a ranking number. The higher that the ranking number is, the better traffic you are receiving. Many search results utilize Alexa Rankings in indexing their results, therefore, if you have a high Alexa Rating not only are you already getting a good deal of traffic, you will begin to accumulate even more traffic. If youd like to see your Alexa rating, all you need to do is go to alexa.com and enter your domain name.
You can also view Alexa rating using the Alexa toolbar, which lets you see how much traffic the site youre currently visiting has. For example, you might be considering whether you should exchange links with a site. If the site youre considering has no traffic then a link exchange wont be worth your time and it may even have an adverse effect on your Google Pagerank which is at least as important as your Alexa Rating.
Using the Alexa ranking system allows you to compare the traffic of your site or other sites with the traffic of the web as a whole. Number 1 is the top rank, so the larger the ranking number, the lower the traffic is likely to be. Lets say that your sites rank at Alexa is something like 1,578,459. No matter how professional the website looks, or how high the Google PageRank is, your website just doesnt have much traffic in fact, Alexa knows of 1,578,458 websites that have more traffic than you do.
It is, however, important to keep in mind that a high Google PageRank will almost certainly increase your traffic. If you have a high Google PageRank and a low Alexa Rating, your site is probably new to the internet. It will take your visitors some time to find the site via Google and the links from other sites. Generally, the Alexa Rating is the second rating that SEO managers should worry about. The Alexa Rating is very useful in analyzing a comparison between your site and others, but you must also keep in mind that because Alexa ranks sites based on visits by users who utilize their toolbar, these ratings can be inflated or under-stated..
About The Author:
Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at for more information about SEO and PRL.
You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews
A Page Rank is a number Google gives to a web page that represents how important Google thinks the page is on the web. When one page links to another, Google considers it to be effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes there are for a page across the whole web, the more important that page must be. But thats quite an assumption, isnt it
The importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself really is, meaning in Google calculations a pages importance comes from the votes cast for it. These votes are then taken into account when the page is ranked.
As a general rule of thumb, Google Page Ranks along with Alexa ratings are the best indicators of how well your SEO work has been going. Granted, the ranking that you appear in on the results for your most important key words is the real indicator, but a strong Google Page Rank will help to boost this position substantially. The more links that you have pointing at your site, the better off you are. Thats a basic rule that will apply throughout your SEO operations.
Page Rank matters because its one of the most influential factors that determine a pages ranking in Googles search results. If you want to have good Page Rank, youd better make sure people are linking to your site.
Well, dont jump the gun and try to get your site linked from everywhere you can, because Google doesnt count every link. They have started filter out links from known link farms (sites that are nothing but big lists of links), and being linked to or from these kinds of sites will get you penalized by Google. Be careful out there. They have also implemented a new relevance calculator that (true to its name) tries to determine how relevant the links into and out of your site are. The most important factor here is that Google considers long lasting links as more meaningful than a recently published link.
The best way to increase your page rank is to contact people with relevant and complementary content (that is, content that does not compete with your own but that enhances it). These links are most likely to last and they will not only increase your Google Page Rank, but they will also provide relevant hits via the links themselves.
How is PageRank Calculated
Google calculates the PageRank PR of all pages it indexes, taking into account all the links to and from each site. When a page votes for other pages by linking to them, it shares out some of its PageRank value amongst these pages.
This algorithm means that a link to your site from a page with PR4 (i.e. a Page Rank of 4) and five outbound links would be worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and a hundred outbound links. Its not just the Page Rank of the page thats important, but also the number of links it has.
The more links there are on a page, the less Page Rank value your page receives from them. You should also remember that it takes progressively more Page Rank to move up a level. It is generally pretty easy to achieve a Page Rank of three. Once you achieve a Page Rank of four, your site is getting formidable. Increasing past this mark may prove difficult and will require very important content. Reaching 8+ is very difficult. These ranks are usually reserved for sites that are crucial for the functionality of the internet.
Each time you add a link, or a page that links to you adds a link, you run the risk of lowering your PageRank. Make sure that you have as few links as possible, and so do any sites that are associated with you.
Google repeats its PageRank calculatons many times at each update, and each time the calculation is made it gets more likely to be accurate. Total accuracy can never be achieved, however, because one sites PageRank is entirely relative to the others. You should understand that the results searchers end up with can really only be properly worked out by Google, because theyre the only ones with access to the whole index.
About The Author:
Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at for more information about SEO and PRL.
You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews