You may already be somewhat familiar with Alexa.
It inevitably shows up on Spyware detectors like Spybot Search and Destroy and Ad-Aware.
You may even have removed it thinking it’s spyware.

It is in a fashion in that it tracks your surfiing behavior and tracks which sites you visit and registers a ‘vote’ for that site.

In that manner, it ranks websites and blogs by their popularity.

For example, the top ranked site is Yahoo!

Followed by MSN, Google, MySpace, Ebay.

Not so surprising you might say.

At the same time, you can check the ranking of your site too.

For example, as of the time of writing this blog, WhoIsAndrewWee.com is ranked 662,094 out of the universe of websites.

Not too bad, considering that about a month of intensive effort has gone in thus far.

However, Alexa’s rankings should be taking as an indicative guideline, rather than a definite guide.

It tracks users who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their computer, so the surfing behavior of Linux and Apple users may not be accurately reflected. Likewise, Alexa is compatible with Internet Explorer (IE) and may not capture the surfing behavior of Mozilla Firefox users either.

This doesn’t mean that the results are not accurate, however, you can use them as a general guidelines and use audit/tracking software to measure traffic on your site.

As you take a look at the graph above, you can see that this blog has been active since mid July 2006 and traffic has started to increase steadily.

By monitoring the traffic, you have a better idea how events such as product launches, content renewals can affect your viewership.

Alexa also has a set of add-ons which you can add to your website or blog through their developer’s section.

Test it out and feel free to leave comments.