Alexa Statistics and You

If you Google “World Website Ranking”, one of the the first (non-paid) hits you will see is Alexa Top 500 Global Sites and looking at that list will show you that Google is the #1 Website in the world. Interesting, as you will later see.

Like many (if not most) people I generally dislike “Toolbars”. Most offer very little value at best and at worst they are spyware and virus magnets if not designed well. Yes, there are some companies that offer toolbars for you to customize and add to your own website and to a certain degree they do help your website “stick” to your readers. I have one to offer on MileHighFan.Com But I digress.

Anyone who runs a website will at some time or another begin to experiment with putting Ads on their site. However, this post is not about the many Ad services out there. What this post is about is the service that majority of companies either use or will use to determine where to put their ad dollars and how much of their money they should pay for an ad on your site. The service of choice? ALEXA.Com which is owned by internet giant Amazon.Com

Alexa is like the Nielson Ratings for the internet. They use the basis that if they can measure the web-surfing habits of lots of people and add some other factors, they can report how popular a website is, will be or has been. The Nielson Ratings did this by placing a piece of hardware in certain select homes and calculating how popular certain TV shows were based on the TV watching habits of a few, calculated to represent the habits of many.

What Alexa does is close. They look at the web-surfing habits of Millions of internet users who have downloaded the Alexa Toolbar and combine this data with some more “secret” data and thus compute rankings on nearly every website in the World! The total number of their toolbar users is not known, but as of 2005 it had been downloaded over 10 million times.

So how useful is the data Alexa produces? Well, a little web research found this interesting bit of information… listen closely. GOOGLE uses Alexa’s data for ranking and indexing! Yes, the #1 Website in the world uses Alexa to rank their web traffic! And if Google is doing it then you can be pretty sure that MSN, Yahoo and others are too. If not fully, at least as a large part of their calculations.

So why is it valuable to use the Alexa toolbar? The main reason is that if you want YOUR websites to be able to command the best possible ad dollars then you need to have as good an Alexa ranking as possible. You need to visit sites like yours and look at their Alexa ranking and decide what are they doing that you are not… or in some cases what are they doing that you SHOULD not!

Case in point. Our little site, MileHighFan.Com was previously ranked with Alexa at just over 20 Million. I really don’t recall the exact number, but it was ugly. I decided to get serious about the website. I began to research SEO information. I tried various “keywords” settings and page formats and made some changes to what I call “stinkin thinkin”. I made a few changes to help readers stick to the site a little longer, move deeper into the website and I began to get to know a few who ran other websites like ours. Slowly, things started to change.

Our previous rank was around the end of June of 2009. Now, at the beginning of January 2010 our ranking is as follows:

World Ranking: 951,110
United States: 123,672

UPDATE: January 15, 2009

World Ranking: 573,874
United States: 88,569

UPDATE: January 22, 2009

World Ranking: 482,824
United States: 69,099

Not too bad for a home-grown site in about six months. These rankings are the standard “rolling 3 month” rankings. The most recent numbers are frankly a little better, but we won’t talk about chickens until they hatch (at 3 months).

One question you likely have is what is a “good” Alexa ranking? Good question. Many want to know, but I find that there isn’t a clear answer. Companies tend to hold their exact data close. But, again, with a little digging you can find some help like this. Back in In April 2009, Netcraft reported there are 231,510,169 sites on the web. So if “your” site is ranked less than 23,151,016 then you are in the top 10% of all sites. Obviously these numbers are estimates but you get the idea.

So, the real question you are likely asking right now… what exactly did you do?

Here ya go…

1: Install the Alexa Toolbar – Doing this make you more thoughtful about your ranking. You begin to make small decisions based on how it might affect your ranking. Yes, there are some sites that say just by installing the toolbar alone your rankings will improve. Perhaps. I didn’t see it though. One thing the toobar does for me is help to decide which sites I’m interested in featuring or linking with. Why for example would you want to learn from a site with a ranking of 34 million when your rank is better?

2: Install one of the Alexa widgets – Alexa has several widgets which will update automatically and feature your current 3-month count among other items.

3: Seek blog owners to review you on Alexa – Ask on Twitter or Facebook or from other blog owners you meet. Ask for an honest review of your site and be willing to take what they write and learn from it. BE willing to return the favor and write about them too!

4: Write useful posts that contain links to Alexa – and discuss subjects that other Webmasters might be interested in reading. Do some homework. Don’t makeup stuff.

5: Post your writing on Digg and other sites like Stumble – Simply put, you have to write and do so on a regular basis. There is no getting around it. Those who write (and promote) will find their rank increasing.

6: Join a FEW good places to get in their directory listing – I say a few because you can get caught up in those little “buttons” on your site. Also, there are some pretty BAD directory sites out there that are really only interested in getting you to feature THEM. One decent one I like is Blog Catalog which when you join will give your readers a link to you (via their small 80 by 15 button) like this: “My Link“. This lets your readers write comments and rank your site, as well as find content that is interesting to them. Remember, do things FOR your readers… not to them.

7: Keep your site professional looking – We’ve all been to sites that have SO much STUFF! Flashing, spinning, blinking, not centered, terrible colors… I’m sure you recall a few. You want your visitors to want to come back to your site… not dread it! If you use a few ( I have a limit of 6) directory/ranking sites (including Alexa) keep them in a common area. Try to feature them in a pleasing order, spaced evenly. And for goodness sake… PROOF READ your stuff! Yes, we all do and will make mistakes, but try to keep them to as few as possible. Have some pride!

8: Don’t “play ranking games” – Others may disagree, but I’m pretty sure that Alexa, Google and others are not idiots. Playing games with “redirect” links, “Auto-surfing” programs or trying to pimp your own site with fake comments and reviews (even from different computers) is likely to create problems for you.

9: SEO Names and Keywords – Make sure ALL of your website pages have clean, simple SEO friendly names and that you use some good keywords. I mean if your site is about basketball then make sure you use “basketball” as one of your words! There are many keyword discovery/suggestion tools for free. Find one and learn something.

That’s it for now. I’ll be writing more as I find information that I can pass along. Thanks for reading and please! Leave a comment if you have a moment. It’s much appreciated. If you have a site and think I might like it then let me know. Who knows, you might just be another “Featured Site” on MileHighFan.Com

Best wishes,
Russ

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