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Alexa
calls itself "The Web Information Company." Its
purpose is to give people very up-to-date information and
statistics about what sites and topics are currently most
popular on the world wide web. You can also use Alexa as a
search engine.
For website builders trying to push their website up in search
rankings, Alexa offers some interesting and practical information.
The best info comes under the "Site Info" tab at
the top of the Alexa
homepage.
On the left hand side of the
"Site Info" page there's a section called "Keyword
Search." Type in a keyword or phrase and click the "Go"
button. You'll get a list of search results like the search
results Google returns. What's interesting, though, is that
Alexa lists the keywords for each website listed. If you type
in a keyword that you use for your website, you can compare
keywords with your competitors' keywords--especially the websites
that rank highly in the search results. They must be doing
something right!
And so Alexa's "Keyword Search" is one more tool
for you to use to create and refine your own site's keywords
and key phrases.
My favorite thing about Alexa, however, is the other side
of the "Site Info" page, under the "Site Lookup"
heading.
Go ahead and type in either your web address (domain name)
or any old web address. The next screen returns an interesting
graph. Above the graph is a gray strip of tabs.
Here's a description of the tabs that are most useful regarding
SEO strategies:
TRAFFIC STATS tab - this is the section that includes graphed
information. The graph changes depending on what is selected
in the blue band above the graph.
NOTE: Most new websites don't get enough visits to actually
show up on Alexa's graph--but don't despair! The information
to the right of each graph often fills in even for very modestly-visited
websites.
Like I said, above the graph is a blue strip with several
clickable tabs. When you click these tabs, the information
on the graph changes.
Below are descriptions of what each blue tab reveals about
a website.
traffic rank
Ranks your site against all other websites regarding traffic.
For example, Google is ranked number one because more people
go to Google each day than to any other website.
A friend of mine has a website that is visited by about
700 people a day, and his site ranks about 60,000.
jiffylube.com comes in at 67,000
wiffleball.com comes in at...Well, "not in top 100,000"
is what it says in the graph, but if you look to the right
of the graph you'll see it's official place is around 1,261,802
If your site is not in the top 100,000, which most are
not, the information does not appear on the graph, but it
may very well be listed to the right of the graph.
reach
Reach means the percentage of all internet users who visit
the website.
google: 31.3%
my friend's site: .00283%
jiffylube.com: .00171%
wiffleball.com: .000067%
page views/user
Describes how many pages on average someone flips through
after they arrive at your website
google: 3.5
my friend's site: 1
jiffylube.com: 3.42
wiffleball.com: 2.6
bounce %:
The percentage of people who look at the first page of
your site that they see and then leave your site (higher
numbers are worse than lower numbers).
google: 28%
my friend's site: 87%
jiffylube.com: 25%
wiffleball.com: 38%
time on site
google: 8 minutes
my friend's site: 2 minutes
jiffylube.com: 2.7 minutes
wiffleball.com: 1.6 minutes
search %
The percentage of visitors to your site that come via a
search engine.
google: 5.3%
my friend's site: 54%
jiffylube.com: 49%
wiffleball.com: 66%
Pretty interesting stuff, huh?
And there's more! Above the graph, there
are other tabs in the gray strip. Go ahead and explore those,
too. They're pretty self-explanatory. The "Keywords"
tab is cool--it shows the top keywords people use to get to
your site through a search engine.
Did you see the "Sites Linking In" number toward
the top of the page? This is the number of websites that have
links to your website on their website. You can click on this
number to see an actual list of the websites that are linked
to yours.
google: 656,000
my friend's site: 488
jiffylube.com: 292
wiffleball.com: 48
FYI, sites linking in to yours is a good indication that
your site has some really good and popular information on
it, and so the more sites a website has linking in
to it, the higher its Google and Yahoo ranks will be.
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