Alexa?

Everybody's talking about optimizing websites for search engines, be it Google, Yahoo, Bing, or other smaller search engines. What about Alexa? Is there such thing as optimizing your website for Alexa? Is traffic the only thing that counts?

Yes, basically. Alexa measures a site's rank based on the amount of traffic it gets.
BUT Alexa is crap. They are very inaccurate and you shouldn't take the results given too seriously.
It just gives you an idea of the amount of traffic websites are getting.

I also hear about the poor accuracy of Alexa. How do they gather and process data to determine a website's traffic rank? I hear that they use Alexa toolbar but I am not sure how it works.

Alexa is one of the the organization where you can find website ranking. You can also optimize for your alexa ranking as well. There are alexa widget as well to work on to get the best outcome for improving the alexa ranking as well..

Originally Posted by noboss I also hear about the poor accuracy of Alexa. How do they gather and process data to determine a website's traffic rank? I hear that they use Alexa toolbar but I am not sure how it works.

Any time a visitor arrives to your site trough Alexa's toolbar (installed on their browser), Alexa is counting the visit as traffic. I don't know how does it exactly work, but one thing is sure: the more visitors you get, the lower your Alexa rank will be. That is the goal.
But it is very inaccurate and can easily be cheated creating fake visits, fake clicks (you visit your site, or ask a bunch of friends to do so, over and over again and your rank will improve).
Kind of misleading, and well, useless...

Originally Posted by lstmin Any time a visitor arrives to your site trough Alexa's toolbar (installed on their browser), Alexa is counting the visit as traffic. I don't know how does it exactly work, but one thing is sure: the more visitors you get, the lower your Alexa rank will be. That is the goal. But it is very inaccurate and can easily be cheated creating fake visits, fake clicks (you visit your site, or ask a bunch of friends to do so, over and over again and your rank will improve). Kind of misleading, and well, useless...

Misleading, sure. Problem is that some people take things like the Alexa rank seriously and will use it as a factor to judge your website.

It's definitely not useless, rather just one tool among many tools, that combined can give you the 'BIG' picture. I'm always checking Alexa stats for sites I visit to see their ClickStream and backlinks. I relate their service to 'Polls" where you don't need to see 100%, rather just a sampling - realizing their margin for error.

Originally Posted by HereForDiscussion .....some people take things like the Alexa rank seriously and will use it as a factor to judge your website.

It's true. When it comes to selling paid reviews on your blog, the higher the Alexa and pagerank of your blog, the more you will get review assignments.

Alexa ranking depends on the traffic to your site.So, when you are optimizing your site in any search engine, the traffic to your site also increases.This can help to improve the Alexa ranking of your site.

We optimize for Google, Yahoo, etc. because they are search engines and they deliver traffic when you rank well.

Alexa does not deliver traffic, they are not a search engine, so we do not care about optimizing for Alexa.