It can be mysterious optimizing a site for Alexa. One, it appears outgoing links to important, heavily traffic websites, matters. Relevant links are helpful to site visitors. Search engines want to know if a site is worth going to. If it is, they are happy to index it in a higher spot. This is a general rule of thumb that you should keep in mind at all times when performing SEO operations.

The simple difference between a site with moderate search results and a site with high search results is that the site with the higher results is generally more user friendly. Alexa Ratings and other rating systems try to emulate how a visitor will see your site. Once they've determined the worth of your site to a visitor they index it accordingly. This is why it is so important to have relevant links. If you are

linking to sites that your users would find interesting, Alexa will enjoy it.

By targeting sites that are similar to yours, but not exactly the same, you'll get relevant links that

Alexa will like. The best sites to link to are with content that complements your own. For example, if your site is dedicated to rock and roll and you link to a guitar sales web site, you'll probably get traffic flow back and forth. One way of ensuring relevant information is to link to yourself from other sites that you own: why try to hunt down other webmasters if you have 20 or 30 websites of your own you can use? Traffic flow is the biggest factor, however, as most of what Alexa does is traffic-based.

Alexa will also assign a site a ranking number.

The higher the ranking number is, the better traffic you are receiving. Many search results utilize Alexa Rankings in indexing their results, therefore, if you have a high Alexa Rating not only are you already getting a good deal of traffic, you will begin to accumulate even more traffic.

You can view a site's Alexa rating by going to Alexa's website. Use the Alexa toolbar and enter

the site information. For example, you might be considering whether you should exchange links with a site. If the site you're considering has no traffic then a link exchange won't be worth your time and it may even have an adverse effect on your Google Pagerank which is at least as important as your Alexa Rating.

Using the Alexa ranking system allows you to compare the traffic of your site or other sites with the

traffic of the web as a whole. Number 1 is the top rank, so the larger the ranking number, the lower

the traffic is likely to be. Let's say that your site's rank at Alexa is something like 1,578,459.

No matter how professional the website looks, or how high the Google PageRank is, your website just

doesn't have much traffic ? in fact, Alexa knows of 1,578,458 websites that have more traffic than you do.

It is, however, important to keep in mind that a high Google PageRank will almost certainly increase your traffic. If you have a high Google PageRank and a low Alexa Rating, your site is probably new to the internet. It will take your visitors some time to find the site via Google and the links from other sites. Generally, the Alexa Rating is the second rating that SEO managers should worry about.

The Alexa Rating is very useful in analyzing a comparison between your site and others, but you must

also keep in mind that because Alexa ranks sites based on visits by users who utilize their toolbar,

these ratings can be inflated or under-stated.