Alexa is a company based in California that offers some really nice services for internet users as well as webmasters of all site kind. Its currently owned by amazon.com and that’s how we can explane the Amazon logo in Alexa toolbar. Its logo it’s the one in the photo below and I believe that all of you must have seen it at least one time in your internet life:

Alexa website I can say that brings together three different philosophies of internet. This are:

• The Google engine philosophy that is focused on pure search.



I made some some searches with this engine and I found some really nice topics to point out. First of all what makes big impression is that when the search results appear at the left side of its one you can see a thumbnail image of this very site, so you can create a full view of the link and take a better decision if this link can cover your needs or not especially if you are looking for something that image plays a crucial role, lets say a camera. Of course after some result this stops but its something that I heave never seen before not in Google, not in Yahoo. I have reasons to believe that the biggest part of the results are taken from the Dmoz open directory project, a big plus because it’s a human edited directory and the quality is ensured. A minus is that results is less in number that of the two engines above. Nevertheless it worth to take a look when you search something hard to find.

• The Yahoo engine philosophy that is focused on a website directory listing approach, along with a portal look

  

  This field has nothing to jealous from Yahoo directory. Its has a full topic listing and can cover one hundred percent your needs. The image concept exist here too and I personally believe that Alexa directory engine look and appearance is better designed from the above.

• c) A new one this of traffic rank.

  

  This is exactly what made Alexa climb in a high trust position in internet and eventually become a number one in this field since 1996 when it was founded. Here you can put a domain in the search field and see a comprehensive stats list in a single page. You can see:

  • c1) Where Alexa directory have this domain.
  • C2) A thumbnail of the domain.
  • C3) Title and description of the domain.
  • C4) Average reviews starts that users have provided.
  • C5) A graph where you can see for this domain the rank, pageviews/user, reach for a wide period of time. Also you can compare it with other sites, lets say your rivals.
  • C6) Below you can check out with numbers the above stats of today, 1 week, 3 months average as well as the 3 months change.
  • C7) Also you get to check where this domains visitor go after the have left it.

The above tools and stats are very useful because they appear for free trends of a site and many more infos that if you are the owner of this site would like to know to optimise and if you are a rival or a future partner would like to know to analyze and take decisions.

But what are the rank, the pageviews/user (p/u) and the reach anyway?

a) Rank: Is your position in a world wide website list. It works like this, lets say that worldwide at this time exist 50.000.000 sites, a rank for xxx.com 3.000.000 means that out from fifty millions sites you are at the 3millions place, the best place is number one of course. Some examples: Yahoo Alexa Rank (AR) 1, Msn AR2, Google AR3, Myspace AR5. This number is very important for the site because as a result it appears its traffic as well, yahoo is not lucky to be in the first place it has the most people visiting it daily (according to Alexa). By now you must have this question: and how does Alexa ranks a domain? The secret is a tool that gives away for free in the net and it is called Alexa toolbar, we will see about it below. When a user who has installed this toolbar opens a webpage then a hit is count for this domain, after that Alexa makes some math and categorises the sites. The problem or bug may I say is that it doesn’t takes also other visitors stats nor ip. Why is that a problem? Because imagine what will happen to a site that its owner has installed a browser automatic refresher pointing to its homepage in his house. You get it well his site its going sky high. So you must take in mind that this stats are just for a quick view of a website just to create a quick opinion about it and they are not absolute, especially if you come across with sites that have crazy pics in a small period of time.

b) Pageviews/User: Are exactly what it says are a number of how many pages a visitor has opened when visited your site. The more he opens the better so you would like to have a big p/u number, a number 5 its very good, below 2 its very bad. This number can be taken seriously because of its statistical way of evaluation. You will have small changes if you have 1000 visitors or 3000.

c) Reach or reach per million is a number that shows how many people will come to your site out of one million. Of course you want this number to be big.

Alexa creativity doesn’t stop here it has many other useful tools that you can use, this are:

a) Alexa toolbar. You can install this toolbar to your browser as add one in order to see quick a site AR, in which websites visitors go after they have left your site, search quick in Alexa directory, earn money if you are affiliate of amazon.com, surf faster safer and more. Have a look and download it here: Dowload Alexa Toolbar

b) Create your toolbar. You can create your toolbar and put your logo in it instead of Alexa. In this way you will get more visitors and more pageviews in your site.

c) Wayback machine. This is more a toy than a tool, you can use it to see how your website looked like some months or years ago. You must defently take a look how Google looked like nine years ago. Take a look here: Wayback Machine

d) Site widgets. You can put buttons and graphs with your stats in your website in order to advertise to other webmasters and to your visitors in general. Put this in if you have an AR below one hundred thousand which is a very good one.

e) Site report. You can enter your information in a text box and Alexa will crawl and analyze the links on your Web site. You will also receive an E-Mail report which includes a list of broken links and links to out of stock and hard to find items.

f) Thumbnail images. Put thumbnail images of web sites onto your own web site using the Alexa Site Thumbnail web service. This web service allows developers to enhance web sites, search results, web directories and other web real estate by adding thumbnail images of web sites. You can sign up for the service through Amazon Web Services.

The three tools above you can find them here: Tools

How do I get indexed by Alexa?
That depends, if you want to be listed in Alexa directory you should be listed in Dmoz. I you want just to see your stats the only thing you have to do is to wait a couple of weeks after you have your domain running and you will be ready to take a look at your stats.