Alexa and Tools Like It

Ah, the wonderful world of the Web. Not only can you find out almost any information on a person, place or thing, but how about sites too? With these tools like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s toolbar, you can find out more than you probably ever wanted to know about a particular web site. These tools offer valuable insight into a site’s traffic, popularity, and search engine relevancy.

Alexa

Alexa makes it easy for one to further search and drill down for information on particular web pages. Alexa offers several features that are useful to Web marketers and users:

Related Links - Alexa provides a great way to discover similar sites to ones with which you are already familiar. This feature lists sites that other Alexa users are viewing in relation to your specific search term. You can also use this to help identify potential Internet business partners, link exchanges and/or competitors.

Web Search - Alexa search is powered by Google, but Alexa beefs up the results with its own additional information. When you do an Alexa search, the top results and sponsored results display screen shots of a site along with the typical site title and brief description. You can also click a “site info” link to get additional information about the site, from Alexa user traffic volume to site load speed to number of links to the site to other site stats and contact information.

Traffic Rank - The more your site is searched for or visited by Alexa users, the higher your Alexa Traffic Rank. Alexa also details how this site’s traffic is up or down over time. Though the data is skewed because Alexa is primarily used by savvy Internet surfers and online marketers, this feature is still helpful as it gives an overall perspective of a site’s traffic within its own category.

Top 500 Sites - After it computes and analyzes traffic rankings, Alexa sorts the top sites into categories including arts, games, news and recreation. A user can then easily find his/her topic of choice with an option to choose from the top 500 sites. Alexa currently offers a new option to purchase a list of the top sites. This can be useful to Internet marketers, allowing them insight into what sites the over 10 million Alexa users in the world visit.

Movers & Shakers - This list is based on changes in average reach; reach is essentially the percentage of all Internet users who visit a particular site. For each site, Alexa determines the average weekly reach and compares it with the average reach during previous weeks.

Wayback Machine - Have you ever wanted to find an old version of a web page or site? Take a ride in the Alexa Wayback Machine where you can see how a web page used to look as well as find old information you thought was lost forever.

Alexa Toolbar - This navigation companion, which can be downloaded for free from the Alexa web site, allows you direct access to much of the Alexa information without ever having to go to the Alexa web site.

Google Toolbar

The free Google toolbar is, in many ways, similar to that of Alexa’s, but there are definitely differences:

PageRank - Google’s PageRank is different from Alexa’s PageRank in that Google’s PageRank value is not only based upon how many visitors come to your site through Google itself but also how many sites link to your page and the popularity or traffic rank) of those pages as well.

Backward Links - This feature quickly shows you what sites link to the site you’re on.

Highlighter - Highlight all instances of your search term on the page your arrive at from your search.

Translator - The ‘Net isn’t uniformly created in English. Use the Translator feature to translate a page into English.

Search Country - Rather than doing a basic web search, you can restrict your search to your preferred country domain.

Search Site - Say you’re looking for information on a specific keyword but don’t want to search the entire Web. With the Search Site feature you can plug in your keyword and receive results only from a particular site of your choice.

News - With one click of the News button, you can instantly get information from thousands of news sources worldwide.

Blog This - This button allows you to create a blog post pointing to the web page you’re visiting. You can even select text on the page and it will ultimately appear in your blog post.

Why do all the legwork of online research when you have tools like Alexa and Google’s toolbar to make your life just a little bit easier? These days, there’s so much information available at our fingertips. We just have to remember to work smarter, not necessarily harder.

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