Search Engine Marketing Blog

What Is Alexa?

Alexa is a search engine currently owned by Amazon.com. It appears to be a popularity based ranking which is achieved by users loading a search tool on their website. Alexa then tracks where you go and compiles the information into rankings based on the number of hits to each site.

The Alexa toolbar installed on your website provides you with certain additional information about the sites you are visiting. For example, Alexa automatically conducts a search when you type in a keyword query and provides you with the same results as you would receive from other search engines. When you submit the keyword, you will get two options along with the search results. The first option will take you directly to the site. The second option will take you to automatically generated information about each of the search results site. You can find out such things about the listed result as a thumbnail picture of the home page, a short contents description, its average traffic volume, a review of the website, links to related sites, the beginning date of the web site’s online exposure, how popular the site is as evidenced by the number of incoming links to the site, and the name, address, phone number and email address of the owner.

Secondly, the Alexa toolbar allows you to view site information about the ownership without actually entering the site. It’s presented as a drop down menu from the Alexa toolbar.

Next, Alexa presents a page ranking based on the number of visits to the website in question by those with Alexa tracking tools. This is the key point about this feature. It only tracks usage by Alexa users. It doesn’t include statistics from visitors who use browsers other than Internet Explorer, or those who don’t have Windows installed as their operating system.

The ‘Related Links’ category on the Alexa toolbar provides you with links to other web pages similar to the one in which you are interested. This feature also provides web sites where you can go to get directory type lists of the categories you’re interested in.

You can click on ‘Tell your friend” on the Alexa toolbar and enter the email addresses of someone that you want to inform about a particular link. This feature is like sending an email without having to open your email server and compose a letter.

You can look at pages from Internet archives that you’ve looked at in the past that have gone missing temporarily. This is helpful when the side is under construction or is temporarily unavailable, but you really need information from the site.

Finally, you can visit the Alexa site and view the movers and shakers list, which is a report of web pages that experienced drastic changes in popularity from one week to the next.

The negative side to Alexa is that while you are browsing, it’s collecting a lot of information about your likes and dislikes based on the web sites you visit. Increased advertising for products in these categories often follows this, particularly if they are related products carried by Amazon.com.

Please view the search engine optimization services provided by ComCorp, Inc.

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