I keep hearing the term ‘Alexa Ranking’. Just who is this Alexa anyhow and why should I care if she ranks me or not? Isn’t it just Google I want to give me a good ranking?

Thomas, Cornwall

Hi Thomas, well I can see you don’t like the idea of being ranked by a woman! But don’t worry, Alexa is actually named after the Library of Alexandria (the company is comparing the Internet to the great font of stored knowledge of the ancient world).

Alexa is a subsidiary company of Amazon.com and is based in California. They collect data on Internet users’ browsing behaviour which is analysed and stored. This data becomes the basis of their web traffic reporting business.

In plain terms, Alexa claims to be able to show you how the traffic to your site compares to that of your competitors - in essence how popular your site is.

On the surface, this could be a great metric for your site.

However, Alexa has its detractors who feel that these rankings are, “useless bits of unsubstantiated statistics and that it only measures your “popularity” from a very specific set of Internet users, mainly from the English-speaking world”.

Alexa can only measure and follow the internet usage of those who download the Alexa toolbar onto their computers. It could be argued that the people who download and use this tool are, in fact, ‘techies’ (who else would want to download the Alexa toolbar?).

If this is the case, a more important factor to consider, when deciding if its use has a place in your online marketing solutions, is whether you care what Alexa users think about your site or how popular your site is amongst those who download the Alexa toolbar. For example, if you are selling diving holidays and the techie Alexa community does not visit your site much, does that really matter to you? After all, they are probably not your target market in the first place!

Maybe instead of trying to become more popular amongst the techie community (and caring what they think), you should be trying to make yourself more popular amongst the diving community?

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