Alexa: Website Information Source & SEO Tool

Alexa was founded in 1996 as the web’s premier information source for websites. The data is gathered by anonymous web users around the world that use the Alexa toolbar. Millions of users now have the toolbar installed on their browser and Alexa has become one of the world’s largest crawlers of the web. You can also download the toolbar to help Alexa gather data. Considering that you probably visit your own websites more than the average web user, it can only improve your site’s rankings to use the Alexa toolbar.

The most popular statistic that Alexa publishes is the Alexa Traffic Rank. The traffic ranker lists all the websites in the world/country in order of popularity. Currently the top ten sites include Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, Live, Baidu, Wikipedia, Blogger, MSN, and Tencent. (Twitter is number 11). JacobSPaulsen.com is number 2,050,162 which while its not super impressive, I’m not embarassed by it. My Android site is number 588,385 in the world, 455,781 in the USA.

Alexa also provides insights into the age, gender, and education levels of users who visit any given website. Because the information is gathered in the open, it is also made available to the public. This is one of the reasons why Alexa has become a great research tool to check out your competitors or the website of a company that you are considering working for or with. Of particular interest are the trends of a site, meaning if the traffic and reach is decreasing or increasing over the last 30-90 days.

Alexa is also a great SEO tool. You can quickly learn about the high impact search queries that are driving traffic to any given website… including that of your competition.

Regardless of what role you play in the internet marketing arena, Alexa can be a powerful tool for you. Install the Alexa toolbar today to begin contributing to the information galaxy.