I know how alexa ranking is always questioned, but what are people's general opinion on it vs. the traffic they get? I am wondering because I was looking on adwords keyword tool and a certain keyword gets 22,000 visits per month. However the 3rd site that I look at for this term in google has an alexa rank of 2,600,000. This seems nowhere near right to me.
Alexa traffic rankings are determined by the amount of people who visit a site with the Alexa Toolbar. This is why niches which cater to webmasters, or may be used by them tend to have higher ratings. For smaller sites, it is more noticeable and not as accurate, but for higher trafficked sites, it is generally accurate. All sites in the top 1k of Alexa are usually on par with any server-side generated stats as everyone will visit them, including webmasters. However, for your mom-and-pop kind of site that has 2k or less traffic per day, you will probably not have that many people visiting with the Alexa toolbar.
The adwords keyword tool shows you the estimated amount of monthly searches. That doesn't necessarily mean that people will click on any of the results that many times. The quality of the title and description could result in far different click through rates. Don't rely on alexa rankings too much. Their ratings are only based on the browsing history of people who have the alexa toolbar installed. A large percentage of those people are webmasters. So the numbers would skew more towards webmaster/seo related sites. Also just because a website has 1 top 3 ranking it doesn't mean they get a lot of traffic. Sites with a better alexa ranking might have dozens of top 3 rankings. Alexa ranking does not translate directly into how much traffic you get. It is just a sample audience, and a biased one at that.
alexa ranking is never a true representaion of actual traffic. it gives you ranking based on the date gathered from alexa toolbar users and depends on when the site was launched as well.
I've found this to be true. I have two sites with similar Alexa ratings. The non-webmaster niche site gets 10 times the traffic.
pages with less than 3000 daily unique visitors show up very unreliable on alexa. 22000 monthly is like 700 daily... 700 daily does not really reflect on alexa stats.
Well I have one site in the "make money online" niche, which is mostly people that are not actually webmasters and then a handful of "internet marketing" niche websites. The make money online one gets 2k uniques a month with an alexa of 2.2mill, one of the internet marketing gets 900 uniques a month with an alexa of 1 million. It all depends on geolocation and niche.
Alexa traffic is somewhat mystery to me because i am getting decent traffic from search engines but alexa still shows the graph with lower markings.So i dont trust alexa.
if you have many indian users, you get higher in alexa, cause the Alexa-Toolbar, which does the actual measuring, this toolbar is very popular in india
I think its not very popular in India. Its only popular among the webmasters. And alexa toolbar is not accurate. Yes its helpful if you are in the business of selling links.
Alexa traffic are determined by the amount of people who visit a site from the Alexa Toolbar. and normal ranking is without any toolbar using. i think Alexa ranking is no use.
I have a theory that Alexa is a ratio of the number of searches vs the amount of traffic you get. I am thinking this because I have a site with 150 visitors per day with an alexa of 490,000. I use it to pick keywords out. There are no other ways that I know of to see what keywords are best, other than asking webmasters for their traffic stats.