What is an Alexa Ranking? How is it Beneficial to My Blog?

 





What is an Alexa Ranking?

Alexa is a powerful well regarded (especially by a lot of advertisers) tool used to rank web site traffic. It allows you to discover how your traffic compares to other websites! A word of warning though – it is not 100% accurate. The lower the alexa ranking the higher your traffic. For example Google has a pagerank of 1 which means its the site with the highest ranking – unsurprisingly. Alexa allows you to check out not only your global ranking but also how your site ranks within any chosen country.





How do they work out your ranking?

Information is collated by looking at the browsing history of users who have the alexa toolbar installed mainly. Millions and millions of people all over the world have the toolbar installed and this is why I said that its not 100% accurate as not every computer user or blog visitor has the toolbar installed. Having the toolbar also allows you to find out the Alexa Rank of any site you visit.  The higher you rank the more accurate your ranking. Sites with a ranking under 100,000 are thought to have an accurate ranking.

Why Alexa is Beneficial to Bloggers?

Your site information on Alexa provides a lot of different information on visitors to your blog.

First up – top search queries. This is very useful for finding out which search terms bring people to your blog.







And what your high impact traffic searches are:







It also tells you how many sites with the toolbar installed are linking to your blog:





It has information on:

average pageviews per user. one month – calculated over 1 month of traffic and 3 month looking at 3 months of traffic and tells you the how much it has increased or decreased.





Bounce Rate:





Time on Site:







Typical Audience:







So as you can see Alexa really is a worthwhile and powerful tool for bloggers. If you have any questions about Alexa just ask?