Fun With Alexa

No, I am not outing another Tiger mistress. I am talking about The Web Information Company, Alexa.com. I like going to the site and finding out my Traffic Rank. I think it is exciting to see that my rank in the US is in the top 500,000 and has been moving up! I hope to get my overall Traffic Rank within the top 1 million within the next month or so. For the past 7 days, I was at 726,000. I eventually want this blog in the top 100,000 sites in the world.

How else do I use Alexa (besides for fun)?

When I was thinking about advertising this blog, I looked to Alexa to compare sites and prices. Where would I get more traffic for the cheapest price. As it turns out, the advertising doesn't seem to be getting any traffic to this site, so I likely will discontinue that and just keep being engaged in the blogosphere.

I also like to look at the Traffic Rank of the sites for which I write. Take a look at these:

• HubPages: Rank 278 When I look at the graph, I notice a slight uptrend.


• eHow: Rank 158 There is a clear uptrend to eHow. Makes me think about writing for them again.


• Xomba: Rank 2370 The graph actually looks flat, meaning that Xomba is not gaining traffic. Hopefully that will change.


• Life123: Rank 9780 This site has another clear uptrend. Maybe I will gain an advantage by being an early user.


• InfoBarrel: Rank 14,160 I am surprised by this rank. I would have expected higher, but there is an uptrend.


• Triond: Rank 22,909 The graph seems kind of flat over the past 3 months.

And what about sites you may be considering. Several fellow bloggers write for Suite101. What is Suite101's Traffic Rank? 816 with a clear uptrend. So it makes sense that earnings and traffic will do well at that site.

How else can Alexa be used? I like to go to some of the blogs on which I comment and click on the sites linking in to see if I can find places that similar blogs have been getting or placing links. Sometimes this will lead me to other blogs which might be a good place to leave a comment to expand my horizons. So far, the best marketing has been interaction on other blogs.

I also like to go to the "search %" tab. When I go there for this blog, I find that the number of visitors to this site coming from search engines has been increasing. That is great and is consistent with the info that I am getting from Google Analytics. It says that I might be doing something right to land high enough in the SERPs (although I am not focusing on this so I am really just clueless).

Those are just a few of the ways that I use the site Alexa.com. How do you use it? Are there other sites besides Google Analytics that you use for information? Please comment and share. And as always, thanks for reading.

Photo credit: Jrcastillof at Wiki commons.