Alexa traffic rank

[inbakumar]

Can anyone tell me please the level of traffic one needs to generate per month in order to achieve an alexa traffic rank of 1 million? Our site is in the 3 million mark and it is making me very depressed.

The reason for my query is to have 1 million as the target to reach for the next year. Obviously, I do not want to set an unrealistic target.

Thanks for your help

Joel

[peterjhale]

I wouldn't worry about it - it's quite unreliable for any business outside the US

It's tracked via the alexa toolbar which is mostly used by US surfers. My rating bounces from 60,000 to 250,000 depending on when I send out my newsletter.

I wouldn't use it at all.

Work out your current conversion ratio (say 1% of visitors buying) - then work out how many sales you want next year - divide that by your conversion ratio and that's how many visitors you need to target

[inbakumar]

Thanks Peter. In my line of business (financial services), there is no straight-forward link between traffic, enquiry and sales which makes it harder to use a formulae (Atleast we don't have one anyway). Also our geographic scope is limited to UK. We actually get very few sales enquiries through the website and very much prefer the word of mouth enquiries. The website is set-up only as a shop-window and I was planning to use the Alexa rank as an incentive mechanism for our small IT team.

Regards,

Joel

[peterjhale]

Joel,

Is it search engine friendly at all ?

I mean - do you target specific key phrases and where are you ranked ?

Also, how do you ask for people to contact you - there are many ways to increase this

Let me know your site or post it for a site review then we can have a look at it for you

Peter

[inbakumar]

Thanks Peter. I have posted our site details for a site review. Any comments welcome.

Regards

Joel

[discountdomains]

About 500 visitors a day normally gets my sites to a rank of 100,000.

If you extra-polate between your stats and mine.

It also depends on the user profile, Alexa has a lot of webmasters so forums / directories etc appear better than they really are.

Clare

[peterjhale]

Hi Clare

Yes I agree - you don't need many - but it depends where they come from.

If you are targeting the US you will get a good rank because Alexa is not heard much of over here

[inbakumar]

Hi Peter & Clare,

Thanks for your advice. My site have had a boost recently and jumped nearly 3 million places in the Alexa rankings. We now rank in the 400000 mark, which is much more satisfactory. The aim for the next calendar year is to break into the top 100000 .

Regards

[peterjhale]

all you need to do is to download the alexa toolbar onto as many PCs of friends as you know and visit your own site 10 times per day - that'll boost your ranking...

[inbakumar]

Hmmmn. There is no point in cheating. After all you will cheat yourself in the end. We achieved the better rankings by increasing our website traffic by 6 fold since May. Obviously, it is not possible to do this again in a short period of time. Our target of 1 year to break into the top 100000 (i-e about 500 visitors a day) is a stretch goal but there is no harm in going for it. We are not going to be a slave to this ranking either as it is always better to go for quality rather than quantity in my line of business.

Anyway, do you know of any other ranking mechanism we can use to measure our relative success compared to our competitors on the web?

Ciao,