What The Alexa Rankings Mean For Your Website
Alexa started out as a way for people to use their software and help track and rate web sites to exchange such information with others who have the same software on their computers. The Alexa Toolbar installs on your computer and attaches itself to your web browser. There are many who do have it installed, but the majority around the world do not. Which is why I personally take Alexa rankings with a grain of salt.
The Alexa Toolbar is technically spyware, but it is useful spyware. It records and tracks each web site you visit and searches made. It is purely for statistical purposes. What makes it useful is it also offers a pop up blocker, a search engine tool, and information about the site you are visiting including the owner's contact information, related web sites, and even the traffic the web site gets. It allows you to leave comments about the web site.
Alexa ranks the top 10% of all the websites out there up to 5,000,000. There are well over 500,000,000 websites around. If you have a ranking at all, you made it.
For an Alexa rank to be relevant, your target audience must have it installed and visit your site with it active. It is a useful gauge to see how well you are doing against other similar sites, but it is not a tell all story.
Let's say you have a website geared for people in a country where the Alexa software cannot be downloaded or a site where people are strongly anti-spyware. If your core audience does not use Alexa at all, you will get a very low or non-existent Alexa ranking. You could get thousands of visitors a day and even more than those in the Top 10 of Alexa's rankings, but if your core audience does not have Alexa installed on their computers and it is active when they are on your site, Alexa cannot measure and compare it with other sites.
Another drawback to taking Alexa ranking too seriously is the fact this device tends to be most functional for only those with the Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer 5.0 or newer browser. There is an alternative for those with the Mozilla Foxfire, but it is not really the full version although it may track your visit.
More and more people are making the switch from the dinosaur IE for Foxfire. An example, in 2004, the average browser used to access this website was the Internet Explorer at a rate of around 95% with less than 2% Netscape, 1% Opera and 2% "others". By December 2005, Internet Explorer had a 75% share of viewers while Foxfire was 20%, Netscape 4% and others at 1%. As Alexa does not even count statistics for non-IE browsers, it misses the count of a large audience that is getting larger.
On the other hand, many people in other countries do have and use the Alexa toolbar and the Internet Explorer is still the most widely used web browser available. It is still only a small sampling of the population, but it at least shows how well you rank among Alexa users which may give you a better idea on the overall popularity of your site. If this niche of people thinks highly of your site, chances are others do, too. If this niche rarely goes to your site, chances are you may have some issues of getting traffic to your site.
So if you are asked about your Alexa ranking, don't feel too bad if you cannot hold a candle to the big sites such as Microsoft or Yahoo! Be honored if your website made the Alexa top 10% of all websites out there.
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