What About Alexa Site Rankings?

One of the benefits of the internet is how easy it is to spy on your competition. They post their whole company online: policies, products and prices. But how popularare they?

Alexa Internet offers you an inside view as to the popularity of any site on the Web. View your website ranking, or even your competitors' rankings.

Simply by entering the Web address at Alexa you can learn:

• Worldwide and country rankings
• Keywords
• Sites linking in
• Average page views
• Average time on site

The site even offers the option to compare your site to another site. This is can be an interesting gauge as your site climbs in theranking.

Instead of visiting the Alexa website every time you want to learn the stats on a site, install the Alexa toolbar (top of browser) or status bar (bottom right of browser) and you can view site popularity within Firefox, whenever viewing a website. This is a great free service that makes online research much easier.

While some critics argue that it's possible to skew the rankings, I suggest that having some gauge is better than none. It is generally felt that unless the site is ranked in the Top 100,000 Sites worldwide, that the results are not 100% trustworthy, but then again, what analytics tools are?

Understanding your competition is critical when starting your online business.