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Alexa gives you information on how much traffic your website is getting. You can use this analysis if your business is on the web. They do this by analysing the sites that people who have installed the Alexa toolbar visit. They mainly only give figures at domain level only. All the traffic to any other pages within the domain name is allocated to the domain name.

If you go their site and type in your domain name you can see a chart which when clicked on gives you three separate boxes of information:

Reach - this shows what percentage of global internet user's use your site

Traffic Rank - this is calculated using page views & Users

Page Views per User - this shows how many pages each user views

Below this are data which shows you the countries where your traffic comes from and your rank in these countries.

If your website has low traffic, do not play to much emphasis on the numbers. Sites with low traffic numbers - less then a thousand visitors per month - are not large enough to give any meaningful data. The higher the traffic the more accurate the figures become. The better way to use Alexa is to analyse the overall trend. Is traffic going up or is it going down?

The figures from Alexa mainly represent the internet usage of people who have installed the Alexa Toolbar. This can lead to heavy bias one way or another depending on who has downloaded the toolbar and the pages they visit.

Google Page Rank was developed by Larry Page of Stanford University. It tends to measure in simple terms the quality and quantity of sites linking to your site. For each site that links to your site you get a vote. The higher the page rank of the site linking to you site the higher the value of the vote.

Google also allocates a value for a relevant link. So if your website is selling computers and you have links from other computing websites this will be more relevant then if you have a link coming in from a website to do with pets.

In reality it is more complicated then this and complex equations are used to determine page rank.

To be able to see the page rank of the sites you visit you have to download the Google toolbar. This has privacy implications as then Google is able to track the web pages that you visit.

The higher the page rank of your site the more likely it is that when people search using Google as their search engine the more likely it is for your site to be found with your key words.

You can buy links from other high ranked pages to artificially boost your own page rank but this practice is frowned by Google. They sometimes ignore links coming from a website which is known for selling links. Buying hundreds of low quality links from other websites is now totally frowned upon.

Even though the Alexa Rankings and Google Page Rank are not perfect they seem to be the industry standard by which many people judge the quality of a website. It is therefore important to strive to achieve a high ranking on both.