Alexa is one of the leading internet statistics engines. It keeps a "top billion" chart, where every webpage on the planet has its place. Beginning with Google and Facebook, it goes all the way down to the gazillionth site no one knows about. It's a chart that gives you insight on how your business is doing through calculating the popularity of your site.
What makes Alexa especially useful is the geographic dimension. It registers your ranking not only on a global scale but also for every single country where your site has some trackable popularity. Therefore you can focus on analyzing your authority in the countries that actually matter to you.
I’ve trawled the Internet over the past 24 hours looking for other factors that are strongly hinted to be part of the AR algorithm. I’ve checked through some of the sites in my own network to verify as much as possible, and where I can, how true some of these factors seem to be in practice. But as I said above, there are no guarantees here.
In roughly the order of importance this is a checklist of items which I currently believe factor into improving this metric.
Traffic Levels. No surprise here. Passive traffic measurement probably utilising those that still have the toolbar in place is probably still the most important KPI (key performance indicator).
There is, however, a skew factor here. The people that have the toolbar tend to be SEO and Internet marketing experts themselves or at least a very high percentage of them are. Therefore it might be thought that if your website was of interest to this group they are more likely to visit and therefore improve your ranking despite having overall lower traffic levels and sites in other niche is. This is just a thought but seems to bear out as my small number of SEO themed sites do a little better visitor for visitor than my sites in other niches.
Number of Content URL’s. Every page or post URL that has content is a potential portal and landing point for new visitors.The analogy here is to imagine having a one-page site as being like a fisherman with one hook in the river. The more pages you have (bearing in mind they all rank independently in Google and the other search engines) the more hooks you have in the river and therefore the more potential portals for arriving visitors.
There is an aggressive subgroup within the SEO world that claim that site size and content bears little relationship to traffic levels and in turn potential profitability. My experience is that a large and continually updated site is far and away the biggest bait for visitors you can possibly have outside of external factors such as back linking.
Backlinks. There’s no getting away from the fact that getting links from other sites for external SEO purposes affects just about any metric you wish to measure as far as your site’s success is concerned. Alexa rank is no different in this regard.
Take a look at their site info page, Type in your own domain and see it how Alexa sees it. It’s pretty detailed information, even if that information is extrapolated from an imperfect data set.
It’s pretty impressive information but it should be borne in mind that most of it is based on data gleaned only from those visitors carrying the toolbar with the caveats of accuracy that I mentioned above.
Regular Updates. For some reason static sites seem to be penalised (or not get the benefits that updated sites get at the very least – which is penalization in reverse and amounts to the same thing in the long run) in just about every metric for search engine optimisation that I have found. Continually back linking to the same URL’s using a tool like Ultimate Demon It’s no-where near as effective as adding new pages or posts regularly and linking to those with the occasional retrospective linking campaign to older content.
Before you get up in arms, I realise this is not fair and for many people with perfectly good static entities. It really doesn’t seem particularly good way to measure anything at all other than someone’s ability to produce content. But every search engine and every metric I have found seems to value regular updates of unique content more and more.
While I’m on this, never get tempted to get your site optimized by one of these “Moz” guys. It’s a 4 figure sum a month for work a poorly trained chimp could achieve in 90 minutes. Being “slow and careful” equates to “Taking a long time and charging a huge monthly fee for clients”..and they have the nerve to call automation “unethical”.
Alexa Rank probably isn’t something I’m going to return to often. It doesn’t play a big part in my day-to-day running of the site or any others in my network. Of course it’s nice to see your traffic rank dip below 100,000 as this seems to be the benchmark for those that do take this KPI seriously to look over their newspapers and finally take notice of you.
There may also be other reasons why achieving a good traffic rank in Alexa has a benefit to you over and above the three reasons I listed earlier in this post. In which case try the tips here to improve your AR, and the best of luck to you.
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