David HasselhoffWith the rise in on line advertising and sites such as Pay-Per-Post and ReviewMe a lot of weight is being given to Alexa rankings. The problem is that even Alexa warns it's users that it's rankings are not very accurate as they only count people who use their toolbar.

What's a web entrepreneur to do?

Thankfully Alexa does not just track your global Alexa ranking, they also track your rankings by country. This is a significant boon for all involved (or at least those who take Alexa rankings seriously) as it allows you to better understand the reach a web site has.

Let's take my website, hmtk.com, for example.

Currently my Alexa ranking is 225,184. It is not in the top 100K world-wide but, I am in the top 100K in eight countries:

Hmtk.com traffic rank in other countries:
Slovenia 24,517
Canada 32,731
United States 45,422
Peru 68,158
Finland 74,135
Croatia 78,764
Romania 93,810
Japan 95,413

Wow, those crazy Slovenians, they just LOVE me!

What this means to advertisers is that if they want to get hung up on Alexa rankings then they should do a little bit of extra work and find out which sites are popular in the market they are trying to tap. Just because a site is over 200K in the world does not mean it is not under 30K in your target market.