Bay Area SEO Web Design

What Is Alexa Internet Traffic Rank?

Alexa is short for the company name Alexa Internet,  Inc., founded in 1996 and bought by Amazon in 1999. Alexa traffic rank is the rank position of a website traffic measure compared with other websites around the world.  The website traffic data is mainly from a panel of “millions of Internet users using one of over 25,000 different browser extensions.” e.g. Now Google.com  Alexa rank is #2  while Facebook.com is #1, which means Facebook.com has “ the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews” ( according to http://www.alexa.com/help/traffic-learn-more ). Google’s other domains got other traffic data and may rank differently.  For example, Google.ca ranks 66 globally and #1 in Canada, which means according to Alexa’s panel data, Canadian.

What is the worst Alexa rank for a website?    “No Data” or just some rank number over 10 million. For example, a brand new domain which only get a little data into Alexa’s panel, can rank #18,751,177.  It is possible that some domains of a few years old get “No Data” because the traffic is really low and no data ever got into Alexa’s monitored panel. One can be pretty sure they have pretty good traffic if the website Alexa rank is less than 100,000 (and the Google Adsense income can be pretty handsome.)  Meanwhile lots of website owners have very good business leads from their websites even their Alexa ranking is about 1,000,000 to 3,000,000.

Should You Care About Alexa Ranking?

The answer is a Yes, for some owners who want to sell their banner ads to some businesses unless they have good real traffic reports from Google Analytics or other authoritative 3rd party traffic analytic companies. Outsiders have no ways to learn about your real traffic data. Alexa rank is the only available 3rd party reference around the world.  Compete.com only measures US not international users and will not show report on your site if they consider your rank is “too low” unless you pay for the Pro membership. Although sometimes Alexa traffic rank is questionable, it is the only way to estimate the website traffic quickly as an outsider. So it is important for website owners trying to market their web page space for banner ads.

It is impossible to fake #1 or #3  traffic rank on Alexa.com, but it is possible to use massive spamming or other ways to bring sudden traffic to your site to improve the ranking for a short time. (It means after the efforts stop, the ranking will sure slide down dramatically )  The traffic may not do any good for your online business if you don’t sell banner ads or what  you care is real conversion from leads to real sales of your service and products. Pretty often those “black-hat” ways may get your website blacklisted by some major search engines.

What Is Your Current Alexa Ranking?

You can always check the Alexa rank by replace the domain name at the end of this URL with your own domain.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/chinesebay.com

It is very easy to know the current Alexa rank of a website if you install some Firefox Add-on or Chrome extensions.  My favorites are:

Firefox Add-ons

I installed Sparky because the official one from Alexa and it can help you to improve your Alexa rank for sure. I like the other one because I also care about Page Rank, which is an important number for Google search engine optimization, which I will talk about in a later article.

After you install the add-ons for Firefox, you need to restart the Firefox browser and activate it. Then when you can see the Alexa Rank when visiting the website of the domain you care about.

Activate Sparky

WebRank Toolbar

Spark Shows Rank Directly

Local search is very important and helpful for local businesses to do Web marketing to promote their business. Google Places is usually the 1st thing Web marketing specialist to think of for local search marketing. With proper steps and good planning, your business can stand out in your neighborhood in Google Places with a great looking Google Place Page with your business marketing details. The following is the definition from Google:

Your business listing, also known as a Place Page, is a web page to organize all the world’s information for every place in the world. And we really mean every place: there are Place Pages for businesses, points of interest, transit stations, landmarks, and cities all over the world. As a business owner, you can verify your business and add content to your listing.

The following video shows a good example of one of our clients:

Contact us today for details to help you set it your Google place page.