What is alexa and what does it mean for my site or for sites i want to exchange links with? Why is alexa seem like the standard? is anything else out there?
Alexa ranking can easily be manipulated. Your alexa rank will increase each time your Web site is viewed by an Alexa Toolbar user. Conduct an experiment, install alexa toolbar in your browser, ask your friends to do the same then visit your Web site everyday for a few minutes, this will definitely boost your alexa rank. Although it’s unreliable, it’s still a measure of a Web site’s popularity, when your rank reaches 100K below (very hard to maintain), it means your site is visited frequently. if you want, read the rest of the article here.
Back in the day one of my websites was below 100k ... maintained it for 3 years... and easily made $1,000-$1500 every month from my site. Alexa is a fun tool to use... I use it to kind of have a idea of how much traffic any particular site receives. If I want to advertise somewhere online... and I see the alexa ranking is under 5,000 .. then I know that may be a good site to advertise on. People say that Alexa ranking is unreliable... but I'm sure google loves knowing their ranked #1 on the world wide web!
Dosh Dosh has a great article about how to increase your Alexa rankings: 20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rankings
Alexa have amazon behind them, they are serious, only them and google have toolbar wide use, which let them collect lots of data. Keep in mind that if site about internet marketing have a rank 45000 and site about home decor have rank 300000 they actually about equal popularity, simply because marketing site visitors have more alexa toolbar installed
You're absolutely right as Alexa is a good way to compare websites from the same niche. It's quite inaccurate when you compare different niches as webmaster related webistes tend to have lower alexa.