Every day, dozens of new websites and blogs pop on the web, their owners dreaming of online success. What they do not foresee is the difficult path ahead of them. The Internet is a competitive arena, and if you are not ready with strategies and tools to combat competition, you’ll fold shop sooner than you can say “Internet”.

Websites feed on traffic, the influx of visitors to one’s site. Traffic is where all advertising and marketing goals of websites revolve around. It’s what websites compete for, and how one stands relative to competition is a question that strongly interests website owners.

As for determining one’s web traffic rank, Alexa is the number one tool used by web marketers. It is accurate, and this service costs webmasters nothing.
Developed by Amazon, the Alexa web traffic rank determines how well your site ranks in terms of traffic relative to millions of other sites on the Web. Alexa calculates the volume of traffic your whole site receives on an aggregated three-month historical data. The more traffic you have, the more capability to increase traffic,  the better your Alexa web traffic ranking!

Alexa web traffic ranking is recognized by industries around the world. When an advertiser considers a site for their advertisement, they consult Alexa first. They evaluate your site’s popularity and your entire Alexa stats (bounce rate, page views, user time on site, etc.). Hence, getting a high Alexa web traffic ranking is a must for freelancers and bloggers looking to earn from their blog.

A great Alexa web traffic rank is also great for your site’s reputation. Alexa regularly publish their top- ranked sites. If are included in the list, that could mean free advertisement for your site. Consumers tend to trust websites that have good Alexa ranking, too. If they want to know whether a site is legit or a scam, they refer to Alexa.

Besides Alexa, there are many other tools available to help web marketers get an estimate of their web traffic rank. Some of the most popular ones are Compete, Quantcast, Ranking, and Technorati.

In addition to providing you data about your web traffic rank, these monitoring tools provide information about your site statistics, including the volume of traffic your site receives and your referring sites.

As for improving your site traffic rank, improving your SEO onsite and offsite is the top priority. Everything else flows from there – better search engine ranking leads to better online visibility. The more visible your site is to users, the more likely you will get visits from more number of Internet users. If you could make’ it to the first or second page of the search results page, that could lead to exponential growth of your website traffic. Other things you can do to improve your SERP includes building links, sharing information on social sites, and buying traffic from reputable vendors and certificated traffic services.