
Alexa is a very powerful tool used to rank web site traffic. It is a listing of all websites on the web, sorted by traffic. Alexa analyzes the web usage of Alexa Toolbar users. Then it computes the traffic rankings after analyzing this web usage. This information is computed to get the Alexa ranking.
Alexa toolbars analyzes three months aggregated traffic data and also from other diverse traffic data sources. The traffic rank will be based on this information. As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. So, we can see that the Alexa traffic rank is based on the number of users visiting the site as well as the number of pages of that site viewed by those users. By comparing the site’s current rank with its rank three months ago, we can see the three month change. Traffic is computed for websites defined at the domain level. Sub domains and websites which are found to be serving the same content are counted together as same site.
Reach :
Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. If a website’s Reach is 25%, it means 25% of the total internet users measured by Alexa is visiting the same website. Similar to the traffic rank, the three-month change is determined by comparing a site's current reach with its values from three months ago.
Page views :
Page views measure the number of pages viewed by site visitors. Multiple page views of the on the same day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the visitors to the site. The three-month change is determined by comparing a site's current page view numbers with those from three months ago. Traffic Trend Graphs shows you the site's daily traffic rank, charted over time. The daily traffic rank reflects the traffic to the site based on data for a single day. Daily traffic rankings will sometimes benefit sites with sporadically high traffic, while the three-month traffic ranking benefits sites with consistent traffic over time.
Data Normalization :
Alexa's ranking methodology corrects for a large number of potential biases and calculates the ranks accordingly. It normalizes based on the geographic location of site visitors and correct for biases in the demographic distribution of site visitors.
Movers & Shakers :
The movers and shakers list is based on changes in average reach (numbers of users). The percent change shown on the Movers & Shakers list is based on the change in reach. The traffic rankings shown on the Movers & Shakers page are weekly traffic rankings. They are not the same as the three-month average traffic rankings shown in the other Alexa services and are not the same as the reach numbers used to generate the list.
Alexa Rank can be increased by :