Why you need good Alexa Rank?

Probably you already heard about Alexa, but you didn’t know what Alexa is and why is Alexa important in your blogging and money making quest. You will find answers to those questions in this post.

Alexa.com is a website which provides information on traffic levels for websites. The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

• What is the Alexa Rank?

Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases its ranking schema on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who visit a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

See Alexa’s definition of the Alexa Traffic Rank:

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.

The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users)

• Why would you want to increase your Alexa rank?

Webmasters, advertisers and ad networks use your blog’s Alexa rank to determine the worth of a link on your website. If you depend on link or site selling as a form of monetization you’ll definitely want to increase your Alexa rank, because it’ll increase your bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing. You want have problems with them if your Alexa Rank is below 100,000 levels.

• Are there any problems with the Alexa Rank?

Yes, problem with Alexa Rank is connected with Alexa toolbar installation. Webmasters and people who are familiar with technology will probably have Alexa toolbar installed. On the other hand others won’t have this installation, because they are unaware of Alexa.

Accordingly to that webmasters and ad networks have advantage when they measure the value of advertising on your website. Alexa Rank has become a central element in site monetization strategies.

• How do I get started with Alexa?

If you are using Internet Explorer, visit this page and download the Alexa Toolbar. If you’re using Firefox, download the SearchStatus extension which displays the Alexa Rank, Google PageRank as well as other useful features.

I recommend that you use Firefox and SearchStatus instead of Alexa toolbar, which I find to be more bulky and less useful.