ALEXA TRAFFIC RANKINGS

The Alexa Traffic Rankings is a list of almost all sites on the Web, ranked by the volume of traffic that they receive. Alexa bases their rankings on the use of the Alexa Toolbar, a quite nifty little toolbar that can be downloaded from Alexa.com. The site with a traffic rank of 1, receives the most traffic. Conversely, a higher traffic rank number means less traffic.

Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. There is some controversy over how representative Alexa's user base is of typical Internet behavior. The basic question is: does Alexa have a big enough number of toolbar users to accurately determine website traffic? The consensus is that Alexa's reliability increases as the ranking of a site improves.

According to Alexa, sites with fewer than 1,000 monthly unique visitors will not have an accurate ranking. These sites have traffic rankings of over 100,000 that are unreliable because the amount of data that Alexa has available is not statistically significant. Conversely, the more traffic a site receives (the closer it gets to the number 1 position), the more reliable its traffic ranking becomes. A ranking better than 10,000 is considered to be fairly accurate.

In practice, due to Alexa's sample size, which runs into several million toolbar users, and sheer availability, many media organizations, webmasters, and even investors use Alexa's rankings to determine the popularity of web sites.

THE VALUE OF ALEX TRAFFIC RANKING FOR WEBMASTERS

The value of the Alexa Traffic Ranking for webmasters should not be underestimated. Firstly, it is the closest thing to a universal, impartial 3rd party measure of traffic we have. It can give webmasters a fair idea of the competition. This is information that the competition will not readily share.

Webmasters looking for new projects can use Alexa Rankings to identify new trends and possibilities. For example, if you followed the Alexa Rankings, you would have had a head's up on the rise of myspace.com and milliondollarhomepage.com.

Domain specialists use Alexa rankings to register domain typos for popular domains and domains which rankings are dramatically rising. Again, sites that are quickly rising in traffic/popularity give domain specialists an idea of the direction the domain market is headed, and they can proactively procure valuable domain names.

Basically any webmaster with an interest in new trends and the rise and fall of certain types of sites, can benefit from Alexa Rankings.

ALEXA TOP SITES LIST

You can see the top 500 sites free on the Alexa site. Alexa offers a one-time list of the top 100,000 websites, which has to be purchased (at the time of writing this, the Top 10,000 Sites is retailing for $999, and the Top 100,000 Sites for $2,000).

Alternatively you can use the website http://www.top-sites-list.com for this purpose. The site gives you real-time access to the Alexa Top Sites List at a fraction of the retail price. The list is available globally, as well as per country.