Alexa Ranking Explained
Alexa is a web information company. Alexa ranks websites according to daily, weekly, monthly traffic they have going through them.
They only track the sites visited of webusers who have the Alexa toolbar installed in their internet browser, but the many millions of toolbars that webusers have installed internationally gives Alexa’s rankings very good credibilty.
Installing the Alexa toolbar and knowing your website’s ranking can help you, in the following ways:
A high Alexa ranking can give you leverage for negotiating links to other sites with high PageRanks
The higher your Alexa rating the more the search engines will index your site, which relate to a higher PageRank
Gives you a good measure of how well your website is ranking amongst its competition
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to the free traffic directed to your website via unpaid listings such as search engines or web directories.
The more organic traffic that passes through your site the higher your website will rank on search engines SERPs (Search Engines Results Pages) and on website rank listings like Alexa.
This relates to more traffic for your website which should lead to more sales for the products available on your website.
The best way to direct organic traffic to your site would be to use white hat SEO techniques, to get to the top of the SERP. Internet studies have shown that the top result on the SERP gets the most clicks.
If you think about it, when last have you gone past the second page of the SERP presented to you on your last Google search.
How do I keep track of how well my site is doing?
By using stats. Tracking the statistics of your website is more suited to the webmaster than the visitor in the sense that a visitor won’t generally be interested in that aspect of the website.
It is vital for the webmaster to be able to keep track of how well the site is doing by knowing:
How many hits the site receives?
How many unique visitors the site is getting?
How visitors find the site?
What search terms visitors are using to find your site on search engines?
What are the most popular pages on your website?
Who is the average visitor to your site?
This is important information to bear in mind in terms of continued site development. Your stats will be the basis for deciding whether the visual design and User Interface is effective, and will also provide a basis for future site development.
A good place to start with building stats for your site would be Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides the basic traffic tracking and will help you start building good stats for your website. Although there are more advanced statistics packages available for the more seasoned webmaster.
Another good measure to see how well your site is doing would be to check your site’s ratings on internet rating services like Alexa. They rate websites internationally in terms of the traffic the site receives.