Looking to advertise online? There’s plenty of advertising space out there on websites or blogs that claim to receive thousands of ‘visitor’ clicks every week. But you’ve got to be careful not to be snookered by salesmen, even if they drop words like ‘page ranking’ and ‘Google list’ to gain your trust.
Truth is, you can do your own research to find out EXACTLY how popular a website is. Let’s use the most simple and easiest way to check the numbers.
First, pull up Google or Bing. Type in the words ‘alexa web,’ and click ‘search.’ The first listing that comes up is: Alexa – The Web Information Company. Click on it, and you’ll see a search bar just under the top menu. Type in the name of the web site you’re looking up — just the name, without the “http://www,” and the .com or .net extension — and click the green search button.
There, you’ll find current ranking information for the site, along with an adjustable graph showing the site’s history for the past week, month, six months or year.
For example, you can see at a glance that the Alexa traffic rank for Google.com is No. 2 in the world — No. 1 in the United States — with more than five million sites linking in. Scroll down to the graph to see the history of the rankings. You’ll see that Google.com had a brief dip in popularity at the beginning of August.
Below the graph and history button is a blue comparison bar. Type in the name of another website, click the ‘compare’ button, and the graph will show the ranking comparison between the two sites. For instance, Yahoo.com comes in just below Google. It ranks fourth in the world and fourth in the U. S.
So here’s what to watch for: If the salesperson’s site ranks in the millions — in other words, 12 million other sites are more popular — no one really reads it. No matter how good the salesperson sounds, the proof is in the numbers. Don’t waste your advertising money.