Alexa.com And Your Blog

Alexa tracks and provides statistics on web traffic and other important information about your blog. It's a very influential site on the Internet. Not only will potential advertisers consult your Alexa rankings, but pay per post sites will no doubt consult Alexa to find how your site is valued in the web. This information is then used to govern how much you will get paid. Some affiliate websites won't even accpet your blog unless you have a suitable rank on Alexa.

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This is not to say that Alexa has a definitive way of measuring a site's real worth, but since a low Alexa ranking has a negative impact for your blog, it effectively, is instrumental in how your blog is perceived in the web. When or if you come to sell your site, your Alexa ranking will determine how much cash you get for it. In other words, you can't ignore Alexa. Even if you have Google Analytics, Alexa provides a variety of very helpful and interesting data for you about your blog. The following is the information Alexa holds about your site:


Traffic Stats on Alexa.com

• Traffic rank: This tells you how you're rated in the world, in America (Alexa's home), and in other countries. It also gives you an idea of how your site has performed in the last three months (whether it's gone up or down). Please note that sites rated less than 10,000 on the web have limited stats.
• Reach: The reach of your blog tells you what percentage all web searches are directed to your blog. You're given a table which enables you to see how your reach has changed over the last 3 months.
• Page views and page views per user. 
• Bounce percentage: It helps to know how many people are visiting just one, or several pages on your blog.
• Time on your site. 

Search Analytics on Alexa.com

• This is the kind of information you can get on your Google Analytics, but I found Alexa's tools to be very detailed and simple to understand (even though they're updated monthly as opposed to daily or weekly). These analytics show you exactly which terms are bringing traffic to your blog and how much of the web's overall traffic you're receiving. This feature doesn't stop there. It goes on to identify how said searches have performed and weather they've declined or increased over the last month.
• Impact factor of your query terms (words or phrases which bring traffic to your site) is then broken down to show how you perform despite high or low advertising competition for said phrases. Mouse over each question mark icon for explanation of terms you don't fully understand.
• It also tells you how often people search for the terms found on your site. If you know this, you'll be aware of how well (or not) those phrases or words work for you.

Audience on Alexa.com

• A fantastically well laid out chart shows you exactly who's visiting your site, where they're from, their gender, and how your site is rated in their country.

Related sites

• If your blog has been on the Internet for some time, Alexa will provide a list of similar or related sites readers may like. Note that new sites aren't included in this feature.

Other things you can measure on Alexa

• Average time your site takes to load.
• An audience snapshot. This is extremely useful as it helps you to target your posts and ads on your page. For example Alexa says that my site: The Relationship Supermarket. com, based on internet averages, is visited more frequently by females who are in the age range 18-34, have children, are college educated and browse my site from home.
• Top search queries found on your page. It also tells you what percentage of the overall traffic (for each query) arrives on your blog.
• High impact search queries on your blog. This information assists you in post targeting because you can clearly see which terms have high or medium search results on your personal blog page. 
• How many sites are linking into your blog.
• Ask your friends to review and rate your site on Alexa. The more the better.

Just go to Alexa by clicking on the link. Type the url of your blog in the search panel and away you go. You can also type in the address of any site on the Internet to see how Alexa has rated them.  You will notice that Alexa's home page shows you the currently hot topics, updated every 5 minutes.  This is a wealth of information which you can use to write your own take on these topics to steal some of the limelight. Alexa also provides the most popular sites on the web at any given time. 

Do you use Alexa and what do you think of the service? See our How Do I Blog page for more useful blogging tutorials like this one.