Does a High Alexa Ranking Mean Success for Webmasters?
June 24, 2007
To measure their success webmasters often rely on their Alexa ranking. Unfortunately, when comparing yourself with the competition, Alexa is not the greatest guide to success.
For those of you who are not familiar with Alexa, it is owned by Amazon, and ranks each website, according to the amount of traffic visiting that particular site. Sounds great doesn’t it? Well it would be, but the problem is, it only measures the traffic that has the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser, and usually, it is only webmasters that have the toolbar installed.
I was curious when one of my low traffic sites had a much higher ranking than one of my higher traffic sites, so I decided to remove the Alexa toolbar. Although the traffic to my sites remained stable, it didn’t take long for my Alexa rankings to tumble. Not surprisingly, when I reinstalled the toolbar, my Alexa ranking soared. So, it is pretty obvious that by just visiting your own website on a regular basis, you can increase your Alexa ranking. In fact, if you got a few of your friends to visit your site on a regular basis, your Alexa ranking would probably rocket.
Why on earth do webmasters rely on this useless tool so much, when it does not give an accurate guide to the success of their website at all? Well, some webmasters sell ebooks and information products on internet success. Telling consumers to install the Alexa toolbar works wonders for them. These newbie webmasters see their Alexa ranking rise rapidly, and believe that the information product they bought has helped them increase traffic to their website.
Others who achieve success through their Alexa ranking are those who are selling their websites, and those who are selling advertising space on them. A high Alexa ranking will ensure a higher price for both.
Unfortunately, the voice of those who promote Alexa ranking as an indicator of website success is louder than the voice of those who don’t.
My advice is this: if you must use an Alexa toolbar, because you can’t resist frequently checking your rankings, compared to your competition, take the results with a pinch of salt. In order to be successful, anyone who has a website needs to see what traffic they are getting to their site, and where it’s coming from, so that they know what marketing efforts have been successful and which ones have bombed. You can use Google Analytics, or SEO Elite to do this. SEO Elite is far much more than just a means to measure traffic to your website. Webmasters can achieve genuine success by using this search engine optimisation tool which will help them to get on the front page of Google for their chosen keywords.
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Nice Article Catherine. Another useful tool I have found is http://www.websitegrader.com, which provides a ton of useful information on how to improve your Alexa and Google ranking.
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A low ranking on Alexa does not indicate that the traffic is not being generated on http://www.google.co.in, http://www.search.yahoo.com and http://www.search.msn.com search engines.