Don’t worry, you don’t have to read entire post to find out. This little beauty is a must have for all internet marketers, and thus why we’re adding the it to our download page. Now I know we all have the Google toolbar sitting on our browsers. That helps us view pagerank, backlinks & cached copies of websites, but why should we also dowload the Alexa Toolbar. Well for one very good reason. It’s been said by some, that the Google Algorithm may actually take into account a sites Alexa Ranking. So does this make Alexa the ultimate SEO toolbar?

 

Checkout YouTube’s Alexa Ranking over the 2 years it’s been running…

Google’s ranking system was founded on the basis of incoming links counting as votes for a website. Simply put the more sites voting for you, the better chance you had of achieving good positions. These days however, less and less sites are actually going to go out and link to other sites just because they ‘like’ them. If everyone was actively voting, we wouldn’t have to worry about how to get incoming links. If our site was good enough, our links would come naturally, and link building wouldn’t exist.

 

Google’s aim has always been to return the most relevant sites (well in it’s eyes anyway) Your site can be highly relevant towards a search term but unless it’s popular and links are passing on this relevancy, your rankings in a competitive area aren’t going to be good. Google is very aware of how the internet is coming along. They realise things are a lot different from what they used to be 10 years ago. New technology and concepts are needed to determine site rankings, and prevent people from spamming there way to the top with irrelevant & low quality websites.

 

Another way search engines can determine if a site is popular or not is through toolbars! When you have the Alexa toolbar installed, it actively sends the information of all the sites you visit to Alexa. This information, along with the all information gathered from other Alexa users is then compiled into some pretty powerful statistics. Of course not everyone in the world has Alexa toolbars installed, but from the large group that does, it can make estimations of what your site is ranking on the internet, along with how much of all the internet traffics it’s receiving.

 

If you’re anything like me, you probably visit your own websites a lot. Heck that’s where I am right now. By using the Alexa toolbar installed, your constantly voting for your site and improving your alexa rankings. The rankings show up on the toolbar itself, and if you visit alexa.com they provide you with some pretty sweet daily trend graphs.

 

We can’t be certain that this is a thing Google is taking into account at this point in time, but they very much may in the future. Either way, it’s definitely a good thing to have installed. I’ve sold sites just through having great Alexa rankings, so if nothing else atleast it’ll give you one extra thing to boast about. It’s like golf though remember, the lower your Alexa ranking the better!

Last Modified : November 3rd, 2006
Filed under : SEO
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