A discussion in my forum has prompted this newsletter as I think it is important for any online entrepreneur to understand how Alexa ratings work in order that they can understand why they may not be that important to the success of their online business. Too many people make the mistake of concentrating entirely on improving their Alexa ratings but at the end of the day, these rankings are just numbers - they won't put money in the bank.
Alexa is a company owned by the Amazon group and it aims to rank every single website on the Internet in terms of how much traffic it is receiving.
Quite simply, the lower your Alexa ranking, the more traffic your website gets. The ideal scenario would be to have an Alexa ranking of '1'. This would mean, in theory, that your website receives more traffic than any other website in the world. Currently this position is held by Yahoo.com and as you would expect, other top sites include Microsoft, Google and eBay.
It is generally considered that a website with an Alexa rating of 100,000 or less is receiving a reasonable level of traffic but Alexa can be wildly misleading and very easily manipulated.
To understand why the rankings are misleading, you need to understand how Alexa gathers the data that it uses to create the rankings in the first place. This is really very simple - Alexa has a free toolbar that you can download and install within your Internet browser and this reports back to Alexa with the details of every single website that you visit.
http://www.articles-hub.com/Article/47488.html
