What is Alexa Traffic Rank?

If you’ve owned a website for a while, you’ve probably heard the phrase “Alexa Rank”.

Although you wouldn’t guess it from the name, the Alexa ranking system is one that ranks every website on the Internet in order of traffic.

Each day, every website is ranked – the website with the most traffic is ranked first, the website with the second most traffic is ranked second, etc.

Unlike the Google PageRank system, you actually want your Alexa score to be lower, rather than higher.

A website’s Alexa rank is based off of traffic. However, it’s not just pure hits that boost your score, otherwise it would be very easy to game the system by refreshing your browser a few hundred times each day.

The Alexa score metric is actually a triad of three items: number of hits, number of visits, and number of unique visitors.

Although the number of hits and visits are important, the only way to effectively improve your Alexa score is by driving a constant stream of unique visitors to your website each day.

Each visitor is counted as a unique visitor to your website once each twenty-four hours, so it is in your best interest to have a constant stream of visitors to your site each day, possibly by keeping a constant stream of fresh content.

If you spend much time exploring Alexa’s official website, you may notice that each website has three different Alexa rankings. It may look confusing, but each number actually has a logical explanation.

First of all, each website has a “three month ranking”. This ranking is the most important, and is what will show up on various web-info toolbars.

As you would expect, the three-month ranking is an average of a website’s traffic ranking over the past three months.

For a new website, this will usually start out at around the seven million mark and then work its way down from there with a steady flow of traffic.

Secondly, there is the weekly ranking. The weekly ranking, as you probably guessed, is an average traffic rank for your site based off of the past seven days.

The best use for this data is determining if a current marketing strategy is working, and for evaluating concentrated trends in traffic flow.

Thirdly, there is the daily ranking.

For the majority of websites on the net, the daily ranking will display as “N/A” – this is because a daily ranking is only assigned to the top 100,000 websites on the internet.

The daily traffic ranking is more of a novelty, so don’t worry if one isn’t displayed for your website.

There is a small bit of controversy surrounding the Alexa ranking system. Although the people behind Alexa do their best to count traffic as accurately as possible, their sources are limited.

For the most part, only people surfing the net with the Alexa toolbar installed in their browser will be counted towards the Alexa ranking metric.

If you don’t have the Alexa toolbar yet, it is worthwhile to consider installing it. By doing so, your surfing habits will be reflected across the rankings of both your own and other websites you visit.

Furthermore, the toolbar can display the Alexa traffic ranking at the bottom of each page, which allows you to quickly make judgments about a website. (i.e: do I want to buy an ad here? Is this website fairly well known?).

To install the toolbar, head over to Alexa’s website (www.alexa.com) and click on the “Alexa Toolbar” heading at the top of the page. At this point, it will automatically display the appropriate toolbar for your browser.

The latest version of the classic “Alexa Toolbar” for Internet Explorer, or “Sparky” if you are using Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

From there, all you have to do is install the respective version of the toolbar, and you’re all set!

Because the Alexa toolbar is more common among people who own their own website, many webmaster or technology related websites have an innate advantage over those of more “classic” topics such as sewing or cooking type websites.

Although you should not use the Alexa ranking score as your sole source of monitoring traffic trends, it is a very useful source to see how your website fares in comparison to others in your own niche.