Alexa:

Alexa is one of the many smaller Internet search engines.

It’s importance for Internet marketers lies in the fact that it provides information about the traffic of websites and a website ranking list based on amount of traffic.

Alexa offers a free toolbar as an add-on for the MS Internet Explorer by which a user can gain access to traffic data about the site he is just visiting. Additional data provided are the whois information, the number of pages belonging to the website, how often it is updated and the number of backlinks.

On the other hand the Alexa toolbar includes some sort of a spyware which records the users surfing pattern and reports it to the Alexa database. This is the pool out of which Alexa gathers it’s traffic data on websites.

For a site ranking amongst the top 10.000 websites on Alexa means that it is a site with very heavy traffic with millions of visitors per month.

Example for Alexa traffic data for www.myspace.com .

Alexa’s definition of “reach” (1^st row below the graph) is “the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given website”. For MySpace this means that 4.3% of the users who have the Alexa toolbar installed visited the site. A 12% plus over 3 months. According to Alexa MySpace is #5 amongst the most visited sites.

Note that this ranking list doesn’t necessarily has to offer a reliable picture – especially for websites with less traffic - as it is based only on a small percentage of Internet users; those who have the Alexa toolbar installed. But as there is no institution which could prove it wrong the Alexa ranking has become some kind of a standard. Many marketers trying to sell info products about generating website traffic use their site’s Alexa rankings as evidence for the workability of their methods.

Since 1999 Alexa belongs to amazon.com.

 

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