Popularity in Internet terms is derived by how many unique visitors come to any given website in a given time period. As you poke around the Internet and see awesome websites, you might think to yourself "wow, I bet they get a lot of people hitting this website every day." Well, there is a free website that can help you see just how popular any site is: Alexa.com.
Think of Alexa as the Neilsen Ratings of the Internet. Television producers and advertisers rely on a small sampling of Neilsen "boxes" installed on cable boxes all around the United States. Based on what this small sample of viewers watch, they extrapolate out what the rest of America is watching at any given time. Alexa.com works in much the same way. Through a downloadable browser toolbar known as Sparky, Alexa tracks all the websites that people using Sparky visit. This data is compiled and Alexa issues a rank for each website, from number 1 (which is Google by the way) through 14 million or so. Websites with "no rank" account for all those billions of websites that don't receive enough traffic to rank in the top 14 million.
So if you are looking at purchasing online advertising from a website (such as atGeist.com or atGeist.net), visit Alexa.com and punch in their domain name to see how they stack up against other websites. While the rank won't tell you how many unique visitors are hitting their website, you can get a pretty good idea as to how popular they are. If you know how much traffic your website receives and the corresponding Alexa rank for your site, you can start to guesstimate how much traffic other sites have.
As a point of reference, atGeist.com in August of 2009 had 11,505 unique visitors and an Alexa ranking of 209,901. Similarly, atGeist.net had 7,961 unique visitors during August and a corresponding rank of 248,591. Plug in the traffic and rank of websites you know using them as your barometer to popularity.
How can you help your ranking? Simple. Get more of your visitors, including yourself, to download Sparky so that Alexa will have more "votes" for your website. It will also show you what the Alexa rank is of every site your visit in the bottom of your browser toolbar.
One word of advice: Don't get consumed with your Alexa rank, it is a two-edged sword. Remember, Alexa's rank is "relative" to the rest of the websites on the Internet. For instance, news websites historically lose rank during the holidays because more people are visiting online shopping websites. It would stand to reason that your traffic could go up while your rank goes down just because other websites are getting much more traffic.
