SolveYourProblem
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Series
How Does Your Alexa Rankings Affect Traffic?
Alexa
is a very powerful tool, used to rank website traffic. The
relationship between how Alexa rates your website and how
popular your website is, however, isn’t as obvious as it
might seem. You need to consider your website’s
ranking, links, traffic, and many other factors. Many of
these factors are hidden and known only to the most experienced
Alexa users.
Do
other websites link to yours? If you want Alexa’s
attention then you should make sure that they do. Don’t
worry: usually, all you need to do is ask, as long as
you offer a link to their site in return. Remember that
your links need to be relevant to your site – don’t take
links from an unrelated site, as they won’t be counted.
However, if the links are on sites that don’t get much
traffic, then Alexa will never hear about them.
The
fact of the matter is that relevant links are helpful
to your visitors. Search engines want to know
if a site is worth going to. If it is, they are happy
to index it in a higher spot. This is a general rule
of thumb that you should keep in mind at all times when
performing SEO operations. The difference between a site
with a moderate search results and a site with high search
results is that the site with the higher results is generally
more user friendly. Alexa Ratings and other rating systems
try to emulate how a visitor will see your site. Once
they’ve determined the worth of your site to a visitor
they index it accordingly. This is why it is so important
to have relevant links. If you are linking to sites that
your users would find interesting, Alexa will enjoy it.
By
targeting sites that are similar to yours, but not exactly
the same, you’ll get relevant links that Alexa will like. The
best sites to link to are with content that complements
your own. For example, if your site is dedicated
to rock and roll and you link to a guitar sales web site,
you’ll probably get traffic flow back and forth. One way
of ensuring relevant information is to link to yourself
from other sites that you own: why try to hunt down other
webmasters if you have 20 or 30 websites of your own you
can use? Traffic flow is the biggest factor, however, as
most of what Alexa does is traffic-based.
After
comparing your site to the other ones it ranks, Alexa
will assign your site a ranking number. The
lower the traffic ranking number is, the better traffic
you are receiving. Many search results utilize Alexa
Rankings in indexing their results, therefore, if you
have a high Alexa Rating not only are you already getting
a good deal of traffic, you will begin to accumulate
even more traffic. If you’d like to see your Alexa rating,
all you need to do is go to alexa.com and enter your
domain name.
You
can also view Alexa rating using the Alexa toolbar,
which lets you see how much traffic the site you’re currently
visiting has. For example, you might be considering whether
you should exchange links with a site. If the site you’re
considering has no traffic then a link exchange won’t
be worth your time and it may even have an adverse effect
on your Google Pagerank which is at least as important
as your Alexa Rating.
Using
the Alexa ranking system allows you to compare the traffic
of your site or other sites with the traffic of the web
as a whole. Number 1 is the top rank, so the
larger the ranking number, the lower the traffic is likely
to be. Let’s say that your site’s rank at Alexa is something
like 1,578,459. No matter how professional the website
looks, or how high the Google PageRank is, your website
just doesn’t have much traffic – in fact, Alexa knows
of 1,578,458 websites that have more traffic than you
do.
It
is, however, important to keep in mind that a high Google
PageRank will almost certainly increase your traffic.
If you have a high Google PageRank and a low Alexa Rating,
your site is probably new to the internet. It will take
your visitors some time to find the site via Google and
the links from other sites. Generally, the Alexa Rating
is the second rating that SEO managers should worry about.
The Alexa Rating is very useful in analyzing a comparison
between your site and others, but you must also keep in
mind that because Alexa ranks sites based on visits by
users who utilize their toolbar, these ratings can be inflated
or under-stated.
