This was a letter submitted to a client in regards to their website's traffic rank according to Alexa. For the sake of anonymity, the letter has been altered and will refer to the web site as LADesigners.net instead of the actual web site.

... Currently, and only because it hasn't existed for very long, LADesigners.net has a rank (internationally) of 1,433,605. What that means essentially is that according to a really complex algorithm that "they" have-- well, maybe an analogy is better. Out of all the sites that exist in the world, as of this writing Google has a rank of "1"; Yahoo is #2, Facebook is #3, YouTube is #4, Live (Microsoft) is #5, followed by Wikipedia, Blogger, MSN, etc., respectively ordered.
While it may not sound all that impressive to say, "Oh yeah? Well I'm in the top 1.4 million!" the reality is that the site itself has only been "known about" for less then a week, and that rank of 1.4 million is actually based on a 3-month average. It'd be more accurate to see what a 5-day or even a 1-week average rank was (in this case) even though that may not yet be the "official number," but at least it could serve as a point of reference as to what the actual rank ("official number") might be in 3 months in that, as stated, the 3-month average is the number that really counts.
Well guess what? There is in fact a listing that shows the 1-week average (as well as the 1-month average, for the record). For LADesigners, the number happens to (currently) be 1/3 of the 3 month average -- 512,048. Oh and incidentally 1,433,605 was yesterday's rank; because the 7-day average remains as low as it does, the 3-month average (currently) continues to drop and is now 1,368,016. And while that number still may not sound all that impressive, if you only count the US, the official rank is 136,741. What's more is after doing a little math, out of the (approximate) 17,020,000,000 sites that exist in the world, LADesigners is currently (yesterday, actually), for all intents and purposes, in the overall top 1%.
Not bad.

That letter may not make a whole lot of sense to some people, being as it's one of those things where "you had to be there." Ultimately, the moral of the story is that Alexa.com is definitely your friend when it comes to web design, SEO (searchengine optimization), etc. And best of all, it's free.