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Leveraging the Power of the Community 231

22. Alexa Rank – While Alexa’s reliability may be ques-
tionable, many advertisers use it to check a site’s traffic
numbers. Alexa traffic estimates can also be compared
to other sites, other time periods (e.g. year over year),
and other traffic estimation tools.

23. Compete Rank – Compete may be more reliable than
Alexa but it is limited to US web traffic.

24. Social Media metrics – In the age of social media,
tracking user generated content may be difficult for a
business as they cannot rely solely on bots and other
automatically gathered numbers to collect data on their
website’s success.

25. Bookmarks on Delicious – A site or page with a few
hundred or thousand bookmarks on Delicious is gener-
ally deemed as a good sign of a site’s health but insuf-
ficient to determine a site’s effectiveness without other
metric context.

26. Bookmarks elsewhere – While it is fairly simple to
hire a service to submit your website to bookmark sites
like Delicious etc. it’s far more likely that a site is a
good one if it is popular on Delicious as well as other
bookmark sites.

27. Social news submissions – Submissions are a better
measurement of your site’s popularity and its straight
visits.

28. Tweets (Twitter mentions) – Being mentioned or
recommended on Twitter is a true success because
people communicate with their peers (“people like
them”) and followers. As a result, they only link pages
that they would truly recommend to a friend. Being
linked more than two or three times means you are an
influencer and respected. It means two or three people
telling 100 or maybe 200 other people. TweetBeep will
send you an email each time.