Using Alexa.com to Help You Find Websites to Advertise on

Here's a little exercise I did the other day to help me search for a website to place advertising on.

I wanted to advertise on a website that has a large number of visitors per day and one that has a high google page rank. One that's also widely searched.

Ever heard of http://alexa.com ?

Alexa.com is a site where you can find out all sorts of information from web traffic, user information, demographics etc.

The following image is the homepage of alexa as of 18th April 2009.

Alexa.com homepage

You'll notice a few important tabs at the top of this website. The default is the homepage.

The following image shows the SITE INFO tab.

Alexa.com SITE INFO page

This is quite an important page where you'll do most of your research on.

We'll return to the SITE INFO page shortly, but first, the image below shows the TOP SITES page.

Alexa.com TOP SITES page

This page shows you the top 500 websites on the web. It's no surprising that Google, Yahoo, YouTube, and FaceBook are the top 4.

This page may be quite useful to search for sites to gain really good back links to your website and maybe great to find general websites to advertise on. But we'll show you how to use keyword research from alexa.com to find targeted websites for your niche to choose as sites to advertise on.

If we come back to the SITE INFO page and use the keyword search box on the left to type in a keyword phrase we can then find targeted sites for our niche.

In the following example image, I show the results for searching for the keyword Make money online.

Results from keyword research

You will notice a list of websites that rank well for this keyword phrase Make money online.

You will also see the Alexa Ranking for each website. The lower the number the better.

Basically, from this list, you want to find a website that has its own domain name and one with as low an alexa ranking as possible.

If we search the next page of results we notice a website that meets this criteria. This is shown in the following image.

Searching through keyword results page

You'll notice from the description that it appears to be a site where we can look for advertising.

You will also notice that it has an alexa ranking of 12,106 which is absolutely fantastic.

We can further analyze this website within alexa by clicking on the first link.

This takes us to the SITE INFO page with the research reuslts for this chosen website. This image below shows these results.

SITE INFO for chosen website

On this page you can analyze various site statistics including how much time the average user spends at this site. ... 10 minutes is quite good. Also, you can see that the site also has over 900 inbound links to the website. And, below the graph you can see that the users have been subdivided by country. Here, you can see that over 45% of the users are based in USA, which is perfect if you are advertising something from the USA.

Another interesting statical measure is the Demographics. Aexa.com actually has very detailed statistics about the user who visits this site. This will be very important because you wouldn't want to advertise a pricey product to teenagers, as an example.

The following image shows the Demographics for this website.

Demographics information

A quick check of the demographics here will reveal most users fall into the 45+ age group whom are mostly male. This is very important because you want to match your product to your target audience.

With all this in mind, we can now go straight over an have a look at this website; however, before that, another interesting statistic is to learn what keywords or search terms people are using in the search engines to find this site. The following image shows the results from the KEYWORDS tab.

Website main keywords

Anyway, now it's time to head over to this website to check to see if it allows us to advertise on this site.

The following image shows the default homepage of the website.

Actual website for moneymakergroup.com

What you cannot see in this image is that it has a google pagerank of 4. Which basically means google sees this site as an authority site. You want to place advertising on sites with high google page rank.

Also you will notice on the right, there is indeed advertising available.

A quick search around this homepage and you will find a link to their main advertising information page.

The following image shows the breakdown for various advertising placements available at this site.

Advertising page on moneymakergroup.com

This advertising page lists all the kinds of advertising offered and the prices. It also says that this website gets over 6000 unique visitors daily.

Maybe this could be a place to spread your advertising budget.

Anyway, that ends this exercise and I hope you actually use this information for your business.

If you found this helpful, please feel free to add a comment and tell us a bit about yourself and your business.

Best Regards,

Steve.