writing.today.com

If you don’t already know, Alexa is a site ranking site. You can download their rating widget called Sparky into the bottom right-hand corner of your browser and see the relative ranking of every site you visit.

It’s a great tool for various reasons–the main one being that if I’m searching through a bunch of sites on one topic, I can quickly glance down at the corner of my browser and get a rough idea of the site’s popularity. Usually, the more popular a site is, the better their information is… at least in theory.

So, if I want to choose an epublisher, one of the many tools I can use is to look at each publisher’s Alexa ranking. The LOWER the number, the better. The #1 site is Yahoo.com. The #2 site is Google. Joe Bob’s Blog About Nothing is probably #18,641,409. That’s bad.

Let’s have a look at a few:

Ellora’s Cave: # 55,839
Samhain Publishing: # 151,838
Amber Heat: # 312,835
Loose Id: # 329,310
Cobblestone Press: # 448,199

That gives you some idea what kind of traffic those websites have. It’s not a perfect marker, but if information is power, I just have you a little zap.

Alexa doesn’t work with everything. My Alexa bar is showing this blog’s ranking as #1,584, which is excellent! It’s so great that it’s pretty obvious if you click over onto other Today.com blogs that Alexa is showing the Today.com site as a whole, not just my single blog. Drat.

But the Alexa tool will help you, and it will slightly change how you see the internet. Great stuff.