Why on earth would anyone want to install a piece of spyware onto their Web browser? No sensible right minded person would unless you are a webmaster and you want to improve your SERPS ranking that is.

The Alexa toolbar is not technically spyware as it doesnt retrieve any private or personal information. It does however log all the sites you visit and as webmasters we can use this to our advantage. It uses this information to compile traffic ranking statistics and a relational list. The relational list is very useful as it shows what other sites people who have looked the current website have also visited. Alexa is owned by Amazon and it is possible to make your own Alexa toolbar with your Amazon affiliate code included. You can then place this on your site and get credited when anyone buys through Amazon using the Amazon button on the toolbar youve distributed, it is also possible to include a link to your site in the toolbar.

Alexa ranks sites from 1 to 5,000,000 and sometimes higher. Ranking 1 has the most traffic and so on, anything below 250,000 and you should be getting some decent traffic levels. This information can be used to determine how well your advertising campaigns are going and how traffic levels are growing over a period of time. This information can also be used to determine how you rivals are doing and keep you one step ahead of them. The Alexa information is also picked up by other search engines so you benefit from an increase in you SERPS as your site progresses up the rankings .

One drawback of the Alexa toolbar is that it only works on Internet Explorer and not the tool of choice for most webmasters Firefox. However I personally feel this is a small price to pay for the benefits I get when using the tool bar for research and to check my sites daily. Checking the stats of your own site has a positive impact on your Alexa ranking as the toolbar is not generally used by the general public so every extra hit from a browser with the tool bar installed is valuable. I have 1 site that is almost exclusively used by webmasters , As webmasters are the people who use Alexa more than any other group 500 page views a day are enough to get this site into the top 500,000 Another site that has 3 times the traffic but the visitors are mostly the general public so this site is languishing in the 2,000,000 s.

Why not try an experiment for a month, Download the toolbar and monitor one of your sites, once you see the data you get and the way it can be used you wont know how you survived without it.

Mark Thompson ran an IT consultancy in London for many years . He now live in Spain and runs an number of websites including The Links Factory.

Understanding What Reciprocal Linking Means
If you have been marketing on the internet for any length of time you have surely heard that reciprocal linking is a great way to boost your google page rank as well as your search engine ranking. But what does reciprocal linking actually mean?Recipr...

How to Get Free High Traffic Links to Your Website
Today I would like to talk about an easy way to get high traffic links to your site for free. This method is really simple and only requires a little of your time to see results. I have personally used this method to generate 260+ links and 392+ uniq...

Traffic Building Secrets
I broke Alexa top 100,000 today!That is exciting to me. For some of you who are in the top 10,000, that may not be exciting, but for me, this rocks!I started my website 9 weeks ago, have 700 subscribers now and today show a traffic ranking of 95,620 ...

21 Web Traffic Generating Strategies
1. Link Exchanges One strategy that many website owners utilize is Link Exchanges. This is where the webmaster emails other websites that have a similar theme to their own and ask if those websites would like to exchange links. If you get enough lin...

10 Ways To Increase Traffic To Your Website
10 Ways to increase traffic to your website.1.Write and submit articles. It is a classic, but it works. This will be indefinite traffic stuck in the search engines for you. Write quality unique articles, not articles that are rehashed or provide no i...

Reciprocal Link Scamming
If you are a webmaster, chances are you have spent time looking for other sites with which to link. Did you know that many webmasters out there go out of their way to hide your link from the search engines in order to boost their own rankings? If you...

About Google PageRank
PageRank (PR) is Googles way of measuring the quality and relative importance of your website to searchers. Its purpose is to give web surfers an idea of the importance of a websitePageRank is measured on a scale of 0 to 10. Your PageRank depends on ...

Finding and Managing Quality Reciprocal Links: A Tutorial for The Newbie
All of us want to increase traffic to our web sites. It helps our search engine rankings, and is a very cost-effective way to provide us with potential new customers. One of the best, and certainly least expensive, ways to do that is by exchanging li...

Tops Tips for Powerpoint presentations
Over the years I have lost count of how many Powerpoint presentations I have created. They are so easy to do and they are a great way to get your message across.Ive learnt a lot of great tips for Powerpoint and so I thought I would share some of my f...

How to Cheat Traffic Exchanges
There are many ways to cheat traffic exchanges and generate massive numbers of hits to your website. Some are complex and some are simple. Below is a list of some of the more popular methods of cheating. Give yourself a point for each method of cheat...