An Alexa ranking comes from a ranking system produced by alexa.com, which is a company owned by amazon.com that audits and publicizes the number of visits on different websites.  The traffic rankings on Alexa are determined by using an algorithm.  This is based on the number of traffic recorded from users over three months; these users have installed the Alexa toolbar.

Traffic is established by reach and page views.  Reach is the number of Alexa users who go to a site in one day.  A page view is the number of times a page is viewed by an Alexa user.  If the page is visited more than once throughout the day, it will only be counted as one page view.  The first phase of the ranking process is determining the reach and number of page views on the Internet every day.  You get the Alexa ranking by calculating the geometric mean of the reach and page views over three months.

If you want to use Alexa, just go to alexa.com and install their toolbar.  The toolbar will give you a search device, but it will show the global rank of the visited site and the sites visited by Internet users that are linked to the originally visited site.

The toolbar will show information and it will pass information on to the central server.  Whenever you visit a site through a browser and the toolbar is installed, the information will be sent to the server which gives your IP and the page that is visited.  It is good to have small numerical ranking in Alexa because it means your site is getting a lot of traffic.

There are advantages to having Alexa.  It assists advertisers and webmasters to look at how marketing on your site could be valuable.  When your Alexa rankings get better, these people will want to bid higher on the advertising space; which means more revenue for you.

Here is an example of MeridianCrest’s Alexa Ranking.