There are numerous tools available on the Internet to assist online businesses. A valuable tool that you should use is the Alexa Toolbar. Even better, this tool is free.

Alexa Toolbar

Founded in April 1996, Alexa.com was designed to provide an interactive web navigation system. The most impressive part of the platform, now owned by Amazon.com, is the free Alexa Toolbar.

First released in 1997, the Alexa Toolbar is known as the "B.S." detector for Internet sites. With over 10 million users, the toolbar tracks how people use the Internet and turns this information into ranking statistics for each site on the Internet. For instance, Yahoo is ranked as the number one most visited site on the Internet.

So how do you use this tool? First, you download the Alexa Toolbar as follows:

1. Go to Alexa.com.

2. Click "Download Alexa Toolbar" at the top of the page.

3. Click "Install" on the next page.

Reload the page you are viewing and the toolbar will appear across the top of your browser. The tool provides you with valuable information regarding any site you are looking at, including your own. It tells you the traffic ranking of the site compared to all sites on the Internet. The tool also provides you specific traffic information for the site and lays out sites that are similar to the one on your screen. Instead of making baseless assumptions regarding how "good" a site is or whether it is successful, you can use the Alexa statistics to get a better idea. If any company approaches you claiming they have a lot of traffic, you can just pull up their site and review the Alexa statistics. This allows you to verify who is receiving a significant amount of traffic and who is feeding you a line of "B.S."

Let's look at Google.com using the Alexa toolbar. Load Google on to your browser and click the #3 number in the toolbar. The Alexa Toolbar information for google shows:

1. The site is the 3rd most popular site on the Internet. [Yahoo is No. 1.]

2. The site takes .8 seconds to load, which is very fast.

Next, click the "see traffic details" link on the page to dive into the site statistics:

The site shows consistent traffic through the year, maintaining a number 3 position. 214,00 out of every million surfers visit the site, which is an excellent "reach" rating. Each visitor views approximately 5.4 pages on the site, which means that users are working there way into the internal pages of the site. This is always good news for a site.

As you can see, using the Alexa Toolbar system can provide you with specific information regarding web sites. The next time you are contacted by someone claiming they have millions of hits or are considering advertising on a site, you can use the Alexa toolbar to get an objective view of the site.

Halstatt Pires is an Internet marketing consultant with http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing firm in San Diego.