Alexa, which is an arm of Amazon.com provide website information detailing an overview of your website, traffic details and related links. However, many people ask us if this information is a useful measure of how well a website is doing.
The Alexa information is based on results collated from the Alexa Toolbar, which is similar to the Google Toolbar but much less widely used.
The Alexa Toolbar, like Google’s Toolbar, phones home when people using it in their browser interact with a website. However, as the number of people using the Alexa toolbar is far less than those using the Google Toolbar, the statistics are far from an accurate measure of your website’s performance. In general it only tends to be more technical people who use the Alexa toolbar and many users don’t install the toolbar as they are concerned about spyware coming with the install. Although there are a couple of us who have toolbar options for Alexa in the Vertical Leap office this is due to the Alexa information coming pre installed with another SEO tool we use in Firefox and not because we use the data.
As a result of the low usage for the Alexa toolbar, compared to the number of users on the internet, the statistics you will get from Alexa are miles out, in terms of the visits you are getting, the keywords used and even the country of origin for these visitors.
So if you have been working on the Search Engine Optimisation of your website for some time and you see some alarming results from Alexa, this might not be what it seems and to get an accurate picture of the visits to your website and things like the related links to your site we’d recommend using a stats packages such as Google Analytics and looking at your site using tools such as Google Webmaster Tools and Link checking tools such as MajesticSEO
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