Alexa – Web Discovery Tool

While every web publisher and website owner knows about it unfortunately very few users do. Alexa has some useful user oriented services that I personally use on a daily basis so I decided to review it.

Mostly Alexa used for quick checkup on popularity of a website. It provides users with such info as traffic details (rank of the website out of all active websites), incoming links(other websites linking to it), related links(related websites) and owner’s contact info. It can also be used to check on site’s credibility by looking at the number and relevance of incoming links and traffic rank. To get some idea check out alexa info on wikipedia.org here. The easiest way to benefit from this service, is by installing ‘Alexa Toolbar‘, which provides you with real-time info about websites as you visit them.

For firefox users there is ‘Search Status’ plugin that conveniently integrates alexa inside browser toolbar. See it in action below

Some interesting stuff from alexa:

Alexa – Movers and Shakers

Movers and Shakers section lists sites that have experienced significant changes in an average number of visitors over the last 2 weeks. Sites that make to the positive part of the list usually have something interesting to look at. Check out Mover and Shakers here.

Alexa – Top 500

This section provides you with a sorted list of 500 most visited sites according to alexa (see it here). There is also an option to view top visited sites by country,languages and category.