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Alexa, The Web Information Company, is an Amazon.com entity that meters website traffic added to it’s index. The company offers a toolbar that gives Internet users suggestions on where to go next, based on the traffic patterns of its user community. Alexa also offers context for each site visited: to whom it was registered, how many pages it had, how many other sites pointed to it, and how frequently it was updated.

Alexa includes archiving of webpages as they are crawled. This database served as the basis for the creation of the Internet Archive (also located in the Presidio) and its Wayback Machine. Alexa continues to supply the Internet Archive with web crawls.

ok, so this might sound like a bunch of blah, blah, blah, but other than Google, Alexa does pull a lot of weight with some advertisers, other search engines (not Google) who use Alexa ratings in their algorythms and for generating additional traffic to your website.

Alexa can be considered a bad word to some marketing guru’s because it can be easily manipulated, but it’s a bad word that is quietly overlooked, just because the value is there, not just to help some search engine placement, but to sell your website to potential advertisers and increase traffic.

First, take a look at Alexa’s top sites list. It will open in a new window, you can close it to return to this page after. Looks pretty accurate right? Google, Facebook, Yahoo, You Tube, Twitter and Yahoo! all top in the list. The ranking system works from 1 in the rankings and counts to down to how many websites it has indexed. So if a new website is added and crawled, you would likely see traffic rankings of about 23,000,000, Google, of course ranking at number 1.

So how again is Alexa information useful?

1. Based on your rankings, Alexa can suggest your website to it’s toolbar users.
2. Based on your rankings, some search engines and directories give better page rank to higher ranking websites.
3. Based on your rankings, you can promote your Alexa rankings to advertisers, and potential customers.

More information about Alexa and how it is benefitial to YOUR business can be found in the members forum.