Alexa has a powerful way to measure and then affect your traffic. When you view your website’s ranking on Alexa remember that part of that rank is determined by links, traffic, and many other factors. Some of these factors are not generally known except to the most expert Alexa users.

How do other websites compare to yours? Make sure you get the best possible Alexa ranking by getting links that are relevant to your website - it’s of very little value to get links from unrelated sites because Alexa does not count them. Relevant links are helpful to your visitors. Search engines want to know if a site is worth going to. If they believe the site is worthwhile then they are happy to index it to a higher spot.

The differences between a website with modest search traffic and a website with high search results is that the site with the best results is more user-friendly. Alexa Ratings and other valuation systems try guess at how user-friendly a website is by guessing what they think a visitor would like. Once Alexa reaches an estimate of your website’s worth they index it accordingly. This is the main reason it is so important that you have links to your site from other relevant websites. If you exchange links with websites that your visitors find interesting, Alexa likes it very much.

The very best sites to exchange links with have similar and complementary content to your own. For example, if your site is dedicated to orchids and you link to a florist or garden club site you will get some traffic flow. One way to be positive that you link to relevant sites is to link to yourself from other websites that you own. You can save time and effort in finding as many other relevant websites. But remember traffic flow is the major factor because Alexa checks traffic flow.

After comparing your site to the others that you link to, Alexa will assign your website a ranking number. The lower that the ranking number is the better is traffic you are receiving. Yahoo!’s homepage ranks number 1 and Google’s ranks number 3 for example - these are huge traffic sites.

Many search results utilize Alexa Rankings in their indexing, so if you have a good Alexa Rank you get good traffic and will get even more traffic. If you want to see your Alexa rating, all you need to do is go to alexa.com and enter your domain name.

You can also download the Alexa toolbar, which lets you see how much traffic any site that you are visiting has. If the site you want to link with has no traffic then a link exchange won’t be worth the trouble. It could have an adverse effect on your Google Pagerank which is at least as important your Alexa Valuation.

Using the Alexa ranking allows you to compare the traffic of your site, or any website with the traffic of the web as a whole. Number 1 is the top rank. If your website gets a 1,409,362 ranking number it means that approximately 1,409,362 websites get more traffic than you do.

Remember that a high Google PageRank will also increase your traffic. If you have a good Google PageRank and a low Alexa Rating, your site is apparently new to the internet. It will take some time to get traffic up.

Generally, the Alexa Rating is the second number that SEO experts will look at. The Alexa Rating is really more for comparison of your website to others. But also remember that Alexa rating is an estimate based on the number of visitors at your site who utilize the Alexa toolbar - so these ratings can be a little large or small. That is the current situation with
Alexa.

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Arthur Browning