Six Reasons Why Your Alexa Rating Is Still Important.1. Additional Exposure For Your Site.
At
end of 2003, Alexa.com's results were being closely linked into listings of its' parent company, Amazon.com. This currently means that when someone reviews your site, it is linked to their amazon profile, which can be accessed when people browsing for books look to see what reviewers like them suggest. In future, it could mean that amazon.com will integrate your web site in other ways, such as showing a list of websites related to popular topics such as marketing.
2. Alexa's relationship with Google.com
See if you can name one major partnership that Google.com or Amazon.com has had where other party came out worse off in end.
Yahoo? I don't think so. Though their relationship has soured for reasons that aren't common knowledge, and Google.com does not supply Yahoo with search results any longer, it certainly didn't make Yahoo.com less popular a destination online. If anything, more webmaster like you and me, who could not afford $200 fee for a commercial review to be listed, rush to Yahoo to see if our Google listings really were coming up number one there, too. Can't think of any other one, can you?
Let's discuss how this is relevant to you.
This little known advantage to having a good Alexa rating is fairly new. I was doing some research on Google, at end of last year, to see what was fastest, cheapest way to get my brand new site good ranking and fast inclusion in Google's database. Using Alexa.com, I was able to discover one of biggest secrets online that showed me how to get a visit from Googlebot spider and included in their index in under a week. The Googlebot spider now visits home page of my site every day, re=spidering my site when I make significant changes.
While I was at Alexa, I noticed that very quietly, without a lot of hoopla or publicity, Alexa Internet began to include a Google search right in their toolbar at end of last year. Upon further investigation, I realized that Alexa and Google were getting quite chummy. This relationship directly led to idea I had which uncovered a way to get Alexa and Google to help me get free, unlimited traffic for any keyword related to my site's topic.
The idea was so simple, so cheap, and so profitable that I started to write a book about it, which I finished this past January. Everything was great, I was getting great traffic. Then I woke up one morning and checked my email, and most of my online colleagues were ticked off about something called Florida update, which caused many small commercial websites to have their listings drop in ranking or disappear altogether.
Of course, I went to check on my site.
Not only did my ranking not drop, I had additional listings and improved exposure. One of several factors that appeared to be reason for my improved rankings, not just in spite of, but because of Florida update, was my Alexa ranking. Further testing on other commercial sites of fellow small business owners confirmed this.
This experience taught me to pay a lot more attention to my Alexa rating, as well as to have a new appreciation for ratings of all my sites.
Your Alexa rating is still relevant to you because it appears to be a factor in your page rank at Google. Generally, anything that is important to Google is important to me, because I wanted to learn how to make site an excellent source of traffic for me. And it worked.
Working to have a rise in my Alexa rating helped me in my quest for free quality traffic as well- every increase in my Alexa rating has coincided with a rise in both number of keywords I rank for and likelihood that my site will appear on first page of search results, first at Google, then with other search engines.
You'd never know that I haven't ever submitted them my link.
3.Your competitor's awareness is increasing.
Those of us who have been online since early 90's, before graphical interface we now call World Wide Web, are well aware of Alexa toolbar, and there are many schools of thought as to its effectiveness as an indicator of your site's traffic.
Whether you believe it's effective or useful, fact remains that you can use Alexa toolbar and resources at Alexa.com to give your site a competitive advantage. Your competition knows this if they have any marketing savvy at all.
