Alexa Toolbar every webmaster should have it

The internet today is a very competitive atmosphere. In fact, there are more SEO experts today then there ever have been. If you are just starting out your site or blog there is a tool that can be indispensable to you in your quest to optimize your web site. This is the  toolbar offered by Alexa.

The Alexa Toolbar is a free toolbar offered by Alexa. Alexa is owned and operated by Amazon. The Alexa Toolbar gives very useful insight into the popularity of web pages, blogs, or sites. It also gives very important current internet trend information that can help you to better understand your traffic. Alexa gets this information on a per site basis by measuring the number of visitors that visit sites on the internet with the Alexa Toolbar installed. The Alexa Toolbar is not spyware, it just offers more insight and information about the web sites you visit and search for.

The data you can garner from a web site with the Alexa Toolbar can be used to compare it against a site’s Google Page Rank(which I’ll get to in another post) to see how valuable a link to the site may be, or what kind of competition you are up against in your niche. This can be very useful when you are optimizing your site, or deciding to submit your site to directories, and other back link resources.

The Alexa services offer very useful information such as the rnak of the site, how many page views it averages a month, average time spent on a site, bounce percentage, reviews from other Alexa users, keywords, click-stream, and even demographics of the users who decided to provide that optional info to Alexa. The Demographics info is 100% optional on the toolbar settings, you don’t have to fill this in if you don’t want.

This information can be used to not only help better the overall user experience of your own site, but it can be used t o keep up with your competitors to ensure your always on a level playing field. This service can be a very useful addition to your web metrics solution.

Overall, I have found the Alexa Toolbar to very use. They have a Firefox and an Internet Explorer version that can be downloaded from Alexa’s Web Site.

Good luck with it, I hope it helps you all out in your quest for information.