Finding ways to improve your website can be time consuming, taxing, and costly; often it can also seem to yield only lackluster results at best. Improvements to your Flash website can take on many shapes and forms, including search engine optimization, social media utilization, and hundreds - if not thousands - of dollars. Ultimately, though, all you really need to begin making your website more appealing and visible is the ability to understand what users truly think about your website.
Unless you have tons of time and lots of money to spare, you usually need to pay someone to find out this valuable information. While paid professionals can provide quite a bit of assistance in this area, there are free tools that can also provide tons of incredibly useful information. Alexa.com is a fantastic website that has been around since 1996; it has since helped thousands of website owners learn more about the people who visit their websites.
What is Alexa?
Alexa is an intricate system that lets website owners account for their efforts and compare their website against others. It functions based off of a user toolbar that is available for free download and installation directly from Alexa.com. This toolbar allows Alexa to directly track the number of toolbars that load a website. Although this allows for a very accurate tracking system to be in place, the actual application is a little bit more complicated. Alexa takes the actual number of website loads as an estimated number based on the assumption that not every website visitor has a toolbar. This means the numbers reported by Alexa can sometimes be inflated and inaccurate. This does not mean, however, that Alexa provides useless data. On the contrary, Alexa provides some very meaningful information about the Internet, and - more specifically - your website.
How Do I Get Started?
It may seems like a simple thing, but all that is needed to begin is to download Alexa’s toolbar. Now you may be thinking, “What if I don’t want to know all of that information?” The Alexa toolbar provides a greater level of information for the community at large by linking user accounts with website views. This is very unobtrusive and doesn’t take any effort on your part once you’ve taken the initial step to download the toolbar. Not only is the toolbar free, but you also have immediate access to deeper demographics such as the race, ethnicity, and even suggested search terms of those who visit your site.
Setting up an account with Alexa helps your rankings by not only verifying that you are the owner of the website, but also creating a profile through Alexa that can be viewed and reviewed by bloggers and other Alexa account holders. After your account set-up is complete, Alexa provides you with a meta tag that can then be implemented on your site to provide even better tracking information.
Compare Yourself with Your Competition
A good rule of thumb is that you should know your enemy better than you know yourself. Alexa provides you with the opportunity to learn a lot about your biggest competitors by showing you the same analytics that are available for your site. If you want to know why they have so much traffic, or why they show up on Google before your website does, check out Alexa’s very helpful search queries to see if there is something that needs to change on your website to help you achieve better rankings, visibility, and more.
Alexa is able to show you how people are finding your site through search engines versus directly typing in your website address; this is beneficial in understanding who your audience is and how they think. Alexa also provides an extremely detailed overview of the search terms that are leading people to your site. In addition to those search terms, you can see the shift in searches by viewing the trending and overall popularity of search terms over time. Lastly, Alexa provides you with a comprehensive list of search terms related to your site that can be leveraged through advertising and search engine marketing opportunities.
Investing in Alexa
If you have the money to spend, it may be wise to invest in an Alexa site audit. The service costs around two hundred dollars and provides you with comprehensive website analysis that goes beyond the data already provided for free. Although it might seem pricey, the website audit is well worth the investment. Whether you are going through a re-branding, re-design, or even simply a marketing push, Alexa will make sure that you have actionable feedback that you can take and immediately use to make your free business website better.
