Using the Alexa Toolbar

The Alexa Toolbar helps you work on the number 1 objective for all websites, that is to generate quality, targetted traffic which achieves your most wanted response (ie to call you for a quote, to click on your affiliate links, to subscribe to your ezine, to buy your product etc).

Let's be clear about this from the outset, it is not about having the fanciest graphics, the most expensive web designer or the fanciest design on the web.

All that work, time and money is completely wasted if nobody visits your website ... it might just as well be a fancy work of art hung up on a wall for everybody to admire from afar.

In the web game you've got to get the click ... if that doesn't happen, you've failed.

That's why it's such a useful tool for webmasters who take their website traffic seriously.

Alexa ... never heard of it!

The Alexa Toolbar is an essential part of the webmaster's kit.

Alexa.com is the leading traffic-measurement company on the Net.

It is an Amazon-owned, Microsoft-powered Search Engine that measures traffic-popularity based on a sample of over 10 million users, who are tracked as they surf, providing the most comprehensive traffic ranking figures.

It gives you some key and very important information about your website and - just as important - the websites of your competitors.

You can't forge or fake this information, it's openly available for everybody to interrogate.

You can see at a glance:

• Related links, sites that are similar to the one you are currently visiting
• Traffic trends, traffic trends from the last four months
• Reach meter, a indicator that shows a site's reach
• Traffic rank, showing the current site's Alexa Traffic Rank

There are currently over 100 million active websites in cyberspace ... wouldn't you like to know how you're doing compared with all the rest in terms of traffic generation?

This quick and simple download gives you that information at a glance as part of your web analytics, with just one simple download.

How does it work?

Here's an example of the Alexa Toolbar in action:

Once you download the toolbar - either for Firefox or Internet Explorer - you get a little icon (like the one above) on your browser toolbar.

This gives you an instant view of the ranking of that site, in the above case, 5,286 out of all websites ... which is extremely impressive.

The lower the Alexa figure, the better, but let's get a sense of proportion here, if you're starting a new website, you'd be delighted to be below 1 million let alone just above the 5000 mark!

A site that ranks at 1,000,000 (or better) is in the Top 1% of all sites, though Alexa does have a few quirks, so it's important too to consider links in and overall traffic flowing in and out of a particular site.

Alexa gives you a number of useful webmaster tools as well, so you can show off your ranking if it's impressive enough to boast about.

Here's the webmaster graphic for this website:

There are five things you should do with the Alexa Toolbar straight away:

1) Download the Alexa Toolbar from the alexa.com website

2) Check the traffic of your own website(s)

3) Check the traffic of websites you like to see how they're doing and if they're as popular as they say they are!

4) Add a webmaster widget to your website if you have web traffic to shout about

5) Take a look at the Alexa Top 500 websites to keep up-to-date with web trends and what's popular.

So, how confident do you feel about your own web traffic?

Why not take the Alexa traffic test to see how you're doing and then, if it's bad news, reconsider your approach and strategy to building websites.

Are you ad-rich, content poor? Have you neglected to think about who will use your site and what information they want to find? Has your site rushed into money-making opportunities before creating an essential destination for web-users?

The Alexa Toolbar information can make pretty distressing reading when you've just started a website ... here's a post I wrote on my blog when it was still early days:

What a fascinating, but depressing, website!

Download the great widget which gives you site data for your website.

(My blog) has a traffic rank of: 25,56273933,199 - see what I mean about depressing?

By the way, that blog has an Alexa rank of 806,536 at the time of writing, so don't be too disheartened at first.

Use the information to spur you on to making a better website ... build new content, improve existing content, research that niche and your keywords ... and you'll soon see your own Alexa Toolbar ranking - and more importantly, your web traffic - beginning to build.

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