Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon that tracks websites. It is one of the leading providers of free, global web metrics. Over 6 Million people visit Alexa each month.

Alexa rank may not be a website statistic that matters most. However, it is is still a useful indicator of site performance.

How Alexa works?

Alexa uses a unique approach to track websites, powering its data from its users. Over 250,000 webmasters and web professionals from around the world contribute to the Alexa’s data by installing the Alexa browser toolbar and surfing the web.

Opponents of Alexa argue that one of the drawbacks of Alexa is that it is not very accurate and it does not track ALL websites. However, it tracks 30 million websites worldwide, which is significant by any standards.

Features and Benefits of using Alexa:

Alexa offers numerous benefits. Here are 1o ways to use Alexa:

1. Use Alexa Traffic Rank to Measure Performance

Alexa traffic rank is popular among webmasters to measure website popularity and traffic. However, it should be used in conjunction with other statistics tools like Google analytics and not as a replacement.

2. Use Alexa Widgets to Showcase your Website

Placing Alexa’s traffic widget on your website is a good way to showcase your Traffic Rank to website visitors, particularly if you offer advertising on your website and if your rank is good e.g. in the top 100,000.

See a real working example below:

3. Free Directory Listing for your Business

Alexa also serves as a business directory where you can list your business for free. It lets you add detailed information about your business including a link to your website. Alexa is a high authority website and the back-link to your website can influence your search engine ranking.

4. Use Alexa to Make Money

Alexa’s affiliate programme lets you make money on your website by displaying products. Register for the free affiliate programme to display a product widget on the sidebar of your website and earn commissions on sales.

Although the successes of such affiliate schemes vary significantly from site to site, thousands of affiliates worldwide are currently make money with Alexa.

5. Use Alexa to Research a Business

Alexa offers an easy way to evaluate the online performance of businesses worldwide. Tools like Google Analytics only measure websites owned by you however you you can use Alexa to quickly view statistics about any business. You can also use it to compare up to 5 sites together. See image below:

6. Use it for Reviews

Alexa’s built-in reviews & ratings feature lets customers leave a review for your business. You can enhance your profile by using Alexa’s review widget on your website that invites customers to leave a review.

7. Wide Range of Search Metrics

Alexa also provides a wide range of search metrics for a website. These include:

• Top Queries that generate traffic
• Top 10 Search Terms with rising traffic
• Top 10 Search Terms with declining traffic
• High impact search queries for the website
• Detailed Profiling of website visitors including Country, age, gender, education, income and ethnicity

8. Find Related Websites

Alexa also provides a list of other similar or related websites. Webmasters can use this to find link building opportunities, identify competitors or research content related to your niche.

Alexa also shows a list of top upstream sites, i.e. the sites user visits immediately preceding your website as well as a list of the top downstream sites i.e. the sites visitors went to after leaving your website.

9. Find Sites Linking In

Alexa also shows the back-link count including a list of web pages that link to a website. This is a useful SEO metric for any website. I also find it useful to research back-links of competitors to explore link-building opportunities.

10. Find Top Sites in a Category

Alexa offers an up to date list of top 500 and the top million websites, as determined by its ranking system. List of top sites globally as well as by country or category are also available. This can be useful for research, planning or exploring SEO opportunities.

11. Explore Hot Topics

The new What’s Hot section of Alexa allows you to monitor the most popular pages on the web right now, as determined by Alexa toolbar. It is not as accurate as some of the other niche social conversation tracking services such as Technorati however it offers another easy way to track what’s popular on the web.

12. Site Audit

I am not a proponent of paid methods of advertising on the Internet so I have decided not to include “Site Audit”, which is a paid feature of Alexa, at the end of my list.

Alexa’s site audit offers detailed website report and SEO analysis examining up to 10,000 pages on your site. It gives detailed recommendations to increase your search traffic and usability report.