Alexa
Toolbar - The Ultimate Internet Tool
by Halstatt Pires
There are numerous tools available on the Internet
to assist online businesses. A valuable tool that you should use is the
Alexa Toolbar. Even better, this tool is free.
Alexa Toolbar
Founded in April 1996, Alexa.com was designed to
provide an interactive web navigation system. The most impressive part
of the platform, now owned by Amazon.com, is the free Alexa Toolbar.
First released in 1997, the Alexa Toolbar is known
as the “B.S.” detector for Internet sites. With over 10 million users,
the toolbar tracks how people use the Internet and turns this
information into ranking statistics for each site on the Internet. For
instance, Yahoo is ranked as the number one most visited site on the
Internet.
So how do you use this tool? First, you download
the Alexa Toolbar as follows:
1. Go to Alexa.com.
2. Click “Download Alexa Toolbar” at the top of
the page.
3. Click “Install” on the next page.
Reload the page you are viewing and the toolbar
will appear across the top of your browser. The tool provides you with
valuable information regarding any site you are looking at, including
your own. It tells you the traffic ranking of the site compared to all
sites on the Internet. The tool also provides you specific traffic
information for the site and lays out sites that are similar to the one
on your screen. Instead of making baseless assumptions regarding how
“good” a site is or whether it is successful, you can use the Alexa
statistics to get a better idea. If any company approaches you claiming
they have a lot of traffic, you can just pull up their site and review
the Alexa statistics. This allows you to verify who is receiving a
significant amount of traffic and who is feeding you a line of “B.S.”
Let’s look at Google.com using the Alexa toolbar.
Load Google on to your browser and click the #3 number in the toolbar.
The Alexa Toolbar information for google shows:
1. The site is the 3rd most popular site on the
Internet. [Yahoo is No. 1.]
2. The site takes .8 seconds to load, which is
very fast.
Next, click the “see traffic details” link on the
page to dive into the site statistics:
The site shows consistent traffic through the
year, maintaining a number 3 position. 214,00 out of every million
surfers visit the site, which is an excellent “reach” rating. Each
visitor views approximately 5.4 pages on the site, which means that
users are working there way into the internal pages of the site. This
is always good news for a site.
As you can see, using the Alexa Toolbar system can
provide you with specific information regarding web sites. The next
time you are contacted by someone claiming they have millions of hits
or are considering advertising on a site, you can use the Alexa toolbar
to get an objective view of the site.
Halstatt Pires is with the Internet marketing
firm MarketingTitan.com -
a San Diego Internet marketing and advertising company in San Diego.
Read more Internet
marketing articles.
Halstatt Pires may be contacted at http://www.marketingtitan.com
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