Is An Alexa Rank Important To Your SEO Efforts?

When it comes to SEO, it’s important to keep track of how your site is doing when it comes to your SERP ranking. Keeping track of your ranking is how you will know if your SEO has been done correctly or if it needs tweaking. As such, there are a lot of tools out there to help you analyze all your website data and determine how well your SEO is doing. One of the more popular tools for analyzing SEO is known as Alexa. But just how important is an Alexa ranking to your SEO?

First, what is Alexa? Alexa is a subsidiary company of Amazon.com. It specializes in providing commercial web traffic data, gathered from users who have the Alexa toolbar or extension installed. Although they have had some notable activities over the years, the one thing Alexa is probably most known for is their “Alexa Rank”. This is a metric used to rank websites in order based on their popularity (i.e., how well a site is doing) in a 3-month period.

The traffic Alexa analyzes is based on things such as reach (the number of Alexa users who visit a specific site in a day) and page views (the number of time a particular page’s URL is visited by Alexa users). However, if a user visits a page more than once in a day, all of those visits will only count as one visit. Ranking is a mean average of the reach and page views over 3 months. The lower the number, the better. If your rank is below 100,000, your site is fairly popular.

There has been some argument over the accuracy of the Alexa ranking, and some flaws in it have been found, making the data less accurate. The ranking systems is a bit biased, favoring data from websites whose users have the Alexa toolbar installed.  This limits those who can enjoy the benefits of Alexa traffic rank to those who know about Alexa and install the toolbar – generally, veteran webmasters and SEO experts. Yet this doesn’t seem to stop other webmasters and online entrepreneurs from using it.

Another flaw is that Alexa can be manipulated with a simple JavaScript function designed to loop through an array of page addresses from your site. You will have to have each address open in separate windows, though, then have it loop back to the beginning when it reaches the end. This is how some people can manipulate their Alexa Rank. There is also an AlexaBooster you can use, and for around $300 a month get a ranking of 10,000 or more. It also doesn’t rank subdomains and subpages separately; it only ranks the top-level domain.

So, there are obviously some flaws to the ranking system and accuracy of Alexa ranks. But does an Alexa Ranking really matter?

In some ways, a good Alexa ranking is good to have.  Alexa ranking is often used in the buying and selling of websites. Online entrepreneurs and marketers can benefit from it when deciding whether to place ads and also when buying commercial space. Many website owners use it when deciding to rent space on their sites for ads and send placement offers to marketers – the rank will factor greatly into the value of site when it comes time to flip it and get money.

Another benefit is a significant increase in page rank on the top search engines. Google takes Alexa ranking into account in its algorithms.  You can also use the toolbar as a competetive intelligence tool, to keep track of your competitors. A higher Alexa ranking can also lead to more content with guest posts as guest writers would want to write for a site with a good ranking. Also, you can use it to see information about your site, so it’s a good tool for SEO.

So, the Alexa Rank does have some good benefits. But as stated, it also has some flaws. So, use if you like. But keep the flaws in mind.