Alexa: Why You Should be Using the
Toolbar
by Mark J Thompson
Why on earth would anyone want to install a piece of spyware onto their
Web browser? No sensible right minded person would unless you are a webmaster
and you want to improve your SERPS ranking that is.
The Alexa
Toolbar is not technically spyware as it doesnt retrieve any private
or personal information. It does however log all the sites you visit and
as webmasters we can use this to our advantage. It uses this information
to compile traffic ranking statistics and a relational list. The relational
list is very useful as it shows what other sites people who have looked
the current website have also visited. Alexa is owned by Amazon and it
is possible to make your own Alexa toolbar with your Amazon affiliate code
included. You can then place this on your site and get credited when anyone
buys through Amazon using the Amazon button on the toolbar youve distributed,
it is also possible to include a link to your site in the toolbar.
Alexa ranks sites from 1 to 5,000,000 and sometimes higher. Ranking
1 has the most traffic and so on, anything below 250,000 and you should
be getting some decent traffic levels. This information can be used to
determine how well your advertising campaigns are going and how traffic
levels are growing over a period of time. This information can also be
used to determine how you rivals are doing and keep you one step ahead
of them. The Alexa information is also picked up by other search engines
so you benefit from an increase in you SERPS as your site progresses up
the rankings .
One drawback of the Alexa
Toolbar is that it only works on Internet Explorer and not the tool
of choice for most webmasters Firefox. However I personally feel this is
a small price to pay for the benefits I get when using the tool bar for
research and to check my sites daily. Checking the stats of your own site
has a positive impact on your Alexa ranking as the toolbar is not generally
used by the general public so every extra hit from a browser with the tool
bar installed is valuable. I have 1 site that is almost exclusively used
by webmasters , As webmasters are the people who use Alexa more than any
other group 500 page views a day are enough to get this site into the top
500,000 Another site that has 3 times the traffic but the visitors are
mostly the general public so this site is languishing in the 2,000,000
s.
Why not try an experiment for a month, Download the Toolbar
and monitor one of your sites, once you see the data you get and the way
it can be used you wont know how you survived without it.
------------------------
Mark Thompson ran an IT consultancy in London for many years . He now
live in Spain and runs an number of websites including The
Links Factory [http://www.links-factory.com/].
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