The Web Authority on the Busiest Websites, Top Sites on the Internet -Alexa.com
Webmasters doing SEO strategy, Marketing and Ecommerce planning benefit from researching the busiest sites, top sites, and trending sites, pages and products.
With Alexa you can research your competitors stats and see how your website compares. It offers site recommendations and customized seo.
With the Alexa toolbar you can get free metrics on any site you visit from your browser.
Alexa offers free help as well as paid services. You can sign up and get certified with Alexa in order to access more of the features. A Basic Plan starts at $9.99 a month for a site.
In the upper right corner of the homepage screen it says “Browse Top Sites.” If you enter one of the top internet sites, your competitor’s site or even your own site so you can get data about it.
Alexa’s Blog explains data science for websites, strategies, site reviews and search engine optimization tips.
Free Alexa Google Chrome Extension
A Google Chrome extension toolbar is available for free. You can click to install it at the Alexa site. When you visit any website on the internet it tells you the website’s Alexa traffic rank, related analytics and which search queries drive traffic to the site.
Alexa provides some data you can get from Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools but it also provides some unique data not available there, such as what site people visited before and after your site.
Competitive Intelligence Toolkit
This provides a website overview, website comparisons, organic and paid keyword research and other features.
The data includes Global Traffic Rank, Alexa Traffic Rank (if it has enough traffic so it is ranked by Alexa), Bounce Rate, Daily Page Views Per Visitor and Daily Time on Site Per Visitor. You can get audience demographics based on how similar your visitors are to the general internet population in terms of gender, education and browsing location.
Audience geography, visitors by country, percent and your website’s rank in the country are also provided. You may need to sign up for a free trial and get certified in order to get this more detailed information.
Alexa also has a feature that tells where your visitors come from in terms of which keywords send traffic to this site. It also tells what percent of traffic comes from the top keywords for the site and what percent comes from search engines.
It also tells what sites people visited before visiting your site and what site they visited after leaving your site. Alexa also provides a section for what sites are related to your site.
You can go to Alexa.com to get the busiest sites and find out what is trending right now on the internet.
Top Sites
Busiest Websites on the internet are listed at Alexa.com under the Top Sites label in the menu across the top.
Top Sites are divided into Global, By Country or By Category. Under Category you will see a group of topics which also have subcategories. This way you can drill down to a niche.
Google, Facebook and Youtube are steadily at the top globally. Researching the categories and subcategories can be very useful.
Top sites in the subcategories can be researched and analyzed. Often these sites have been on the internet for a longer time than their competition and they usually have a large number of pages.
News trends can cause a somewhat unknown site to suddenly have a spike in visitors. On the day the screenshot below was made Facebook was in the news for a new search feature and it overtook Google.
Following trends is especially important to those interested in ecommerce and SEO.
What’s Hot Right Now on the Internet – Popular Pages, Hot Topics, Hot Pages, Hot Products
To see what is trending Right Now on the internet click the What’s Hot label in the menu across the top to see Hot Topics, Pages, and Products.
On any given day the news of the day will cause a spike in some topics. Looking at the Hot Topics, Pages and Products gives a total overview of what people are looking at on the internet in real time right now.
Evaluating demand and possible traffic for your seo strategy can help you create viral content. Perhaps there is a sudden spike in a subcategory related to your niche. You might create content that does a review, a comparison and contrast, or some other content that is related to the spiking traffic niche.
Following the internet’s most popular sites and the hot topics has been compared to taking the pulse of the internet. What is new today might drop off and something else will be spiking on another day.
If you are in ecommerce and selling products such as books from your website you can write a review of a popular book that is spiking in popularity. Or create content around a hot product that is trending which you offer for sale at your site.
Alexa has products such as the “Alexa Toolbar” that you can install, plus the Alexa website audit and Search Engine Optimization Tips.
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