How important is alexa ranking?

please suggest me anyone how important is alexa ranking in 2008

Not very important at all.

I would suggest that you ignore it unless you are comparing sites in the same market and I would not use the values as accurate.

I have met some webmasters able to artificially inflate their alexa ranking but in my experience, it is not important as your SERP.

Actually - it varies a good bit by industry and the space you are in. Alexa ranking by itself does not "do anything" for you - the way page rank & SERPS do. They are measuring two fundamentally different things.

Alexa is simply a measure of your traffic - your visitor demographics, etc. Very similar to what sites like Quantcast do. It is useful for researching sites and seeing how well they are doing -- how "important" they are in terms of actual visitorship & traffic.

Google page rank tells you nothing about traffic - or visitorship. It is a measure of how important or valuable a page is in the mind of Google. That does affect search results placement - so it can affect traffic - but there are plenty of high page rank low traffic sites - just as there are plenty of high traffic low page rank sites.

Just two fundamentally different measures - one is not more or less important than the other.

I really like the Alexa ranking and am very thankful that they offer the service. It diverts my competitors from more important work.

hmmm... i only use it as estimate result... but really don't rely on it..

I use it to compare how I am ranking to my competitors. I think it is one factor, maybe a small on, in a bigger picture.

Yes, it is very important if you are selling banners or links in your website. Advertiser will check your alexa rank before purchasing banners, it's also important for setting up the price of your advertising spots

Alexa ranking can be faked or twisted, PR though definatley sells.

I really hope this question is not too dumb but my business online is not being and SEO exert. I just use what I can learn about SEO and other website development. M y question is when using an onlne website builder does having a alexa tool bar make any difference.

Alexa is a waste of time. Stats that should be important to you are # of visitors, length of visit, conversion rate, bounce rate. Focus on improving those.

A lot of people question the validity of the Alexa statistics, but is there an alternative that provides more accurate traffic ranking comparison for websites?

I take it with a grain of salt, but I do find stats from Alexa, Quantcast, and Compete very interesting. I think it's important to be aware of them, if nothing else. I usually try to compare numbers from all three to arrive at an accurate and valid snapshot.

I also use it only to compare how I am ranking to my competitors.

I think it's a good tool to compare.
But i don't know how accurate the data is.

Important only if you want to sell your web site