Monitoring Website Popularity

The popularity of a site can be measured using several forms of ranking systems. The most recognized of these are Google’s PageRank and the Alexa Ranking system.

Measuring tools are important for website owners and web developers because these provide them a quantitative assessment of how popular their websites are. For these people, popularity is a serious concern especially if their websites are business-oriented or geared towards earning - either directly as in the case of online shops or indirectly through advertising. For those who have online investments, popularity directly translates to income and faster return.

Between the two ranking systems, Google PageRank is the more commonly-used. Aside from the fact that it does not require site owners and developers to install additional toolbars, PageRank is also one of many factors that determine the position of the page in search result listings. It evaluates a web page's importance based on several factors such as the number of links to and from the site, ranking of the sites linking to the site in question, keyword usage and density, and tags – basically all the necessary areas that a typical SEO optimization company would target.

Alexa Ranking, on the other hand, evaluates sites based on tracking information of users of its Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer and from integrated sidebars in Mozilla and Netscape. This basically means that a site’s ranking is dependent not only on the download of the Alexa toolbar but also on the number of viewers who use the Alexa toolbar – a factor that even a san diego seo company couldn’t do anything to alter. In other words, a website may become extremely popular and still have a low Alexa score if most of its visitors do not use Alexa toolbar – a valid reason why most people prefer Google.

Regardless of which measuring tool one uses to evaluate ranking, in the end it’s the site’s popularity that counts. Whether it’s Google PageRank or Alexa Ranking, the important thing is that people visit your site. This is why web developers nowadays avail of several website seo services just to increase site popularity and visibility. Search engines provide a great help but there are other ways besides seo to increase traffic in your website.