Alexa Traffic Rankings

www.Alexa.com is a popular traffic ranking website among the Search Engine Marketing industry as well as among those who are concerned about their online ranking.

As stated on the Alexa website: "Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users."

Many users however get confused as to what this traffic ranking actually means. What Alexa is doing is comparing your site's traffic (the number of visitors to your site) with that of all the other websites in the world.

Also we must take note that the traffic that it measures is only traffic from those who have the Alexa toolbar installed. Because of this there will be a bias towards more technical sites getting ranked higher, as more technical users use this toolbar. Alexa states:

"The traffic data are based on the set of toolbars that use Alexa data, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population."

Alexa, therefore is not a very reliable tool when comparing your website to the world. Perhaps a better analysis would be to compare your website to those of your direct competitors in your own field. Take for example:

• Compelite Limited - Alexa Ranking of 227,693
• Jump Web Services Limited - Alexa Ranking of 412,963
• Agog Digital Marketing Strategy - Alexa Ranking of 860,550
• Flying Tiger Web Design - Alexa Ranking of 2,254,795
• Fluid Design and Marketing - Alexa Ranking of 3,302,708
• Rebound Internet Services Limited - Alexa Ranking of 4,018,912

This way you can see a much better analysis of your Traffic Ranking in comparison to your competitors. If you notice that your ranking has dropped significantly, check the ranking of your competitors to see if the trend is the same.

One must also take note that Alexa states:

"Generally, Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant"

Therefore you should really only look to Alexa as a reliable tool when your Alexa Ranking is well withing the 100,000 mark.

A more important measure of Website Ranking is where your website appears when someone searches for it in either Google, Yahoo or MSN. If you type "web design hong kong" into Google, we would expect to see Compelite on the first page.

This means that your website is highly visible, and there is a good chance that users will click on it if it appears on the first page of search engine results. Check out Compelite's Search Engine Marketing (SEM) services and get your website listed where the clients are clicking!