Webmasters should all become familiar with the tools available from Alexa.com.  They can significantly help optimize a website.  The Amazon-owned, Google powered search engine is best known for its website traffic popularity rankings, but Alexa is so much more than that.

First founded in1996, Alexa grew from the visionary idea that web navigation should be intelligent and constantly improving. From that early premise, Alexa has developed one of the largest web crawls and grown into the leading internet traffic-measurement company on the web. The more people use Alexa, the more useful it becomes.

The Alexa Toolbar is at the core of Alexa’s system. Millions of members worldwide have downloaded the Alexa Toolbar to take advantage of this free web navigation service that works with users’ web browsers.  As users surf the web Alexa accompanies them and provides useful information about the sites they visit and suggests related links.

Alexa Toolbar users form a world-wide community that contributes extremely valuable information about the web, how it is used, and what is considered relevant or not. Alexa website rankings are developed based on an information sampling from about 10 million users.

From a search engine optimization standpoint all webmasters would love to tap into an audience of 10 million users! In fact, there are tremendous benefits to those who optimize their website for Alexa’s audience. Your Alexa score is influenced only by those who possess the Alexa browser plugin, thus may have stipulated that websites with subject matter catering to the webmaster audience may fair best. With that said, any and all websites can benefit from Alexa, and it is unwise to neglect their overall reach.

By creating informative and powerful content for your website, this is certain to translate into more page views. More page views will lead to more overall website visits and your Alexa score will then dramatically improve. It is then fair to say that the content on your website may be the way to Alexa’s heart.

To download Alexa’s free toolbar and request a free “Crawl” of your website, visit Alexa’s website at www.Alexa.com.

The current version of Alexa’s Toolbar was designed to work with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but Mozilla Firefox don’t panic you  can take advantage of Alexa’s Toolbar, too thanks to Sparky, Alexa’s free browser plug-in for Firefox.

Sparky provides useful information about sites the user visits without interrupting Web browsing. Sparky produces a sparkline graph of traffic trends for a site and the site’s Alexa Traffic Rank and Reach and provides one-click access to Alexa’s listing for the site, Related Links, and more. Some pretty cool stuff– and it is all free!

Using all this information from Alexa Toolbar community users has allowed Alexa to develop products that have revolutionized web navigation and intelligence. Alexa’s tools are unprecedented in scope and can help users find broken links and help drive traffic to their websites.

Some Key Features of the Alexa Toolbar

Thumbnail Images of Sites and Site Information Balloons–These features are built around the notion that timely and relevant information is essential to a vital web experience.  These features allow Alexa’s Search and Browse to be more complete, relevant and useful.  They let users quickly decide which results are useful and which are not.

Site Overview pages, Traffic Detail pages and Related Links pages–These pages provide Alexa Toolbar users with timely and relevant information from their massive database that include statistics about sites, related links and more details that can be easily accessed by simply typing the URL of any site into the Alexa Search box.

Traffic and Site Stats–This feature list the links that point to your site.  To find out which sites Alexa found that link to your website, click the Sites Pointing In link.  It is located in the Site Info and Related Links drop down menus of the Toolbar and on the site’s Overview page.

Movers and Shakers–This is Alexa’s current list of sites jumping in traffic.

Hot Searches–Alexa’s list of the most popular and frequent searches on the web.

Top Sites–List of Alexa’s top sites by language or categories

This list of Alexa’s key features is by no means all inclusive yet it should spark enough curiosity to cause a quick visit to their website if you haven’t already done so.  Find out more about these powerful web tools available from Alexa that will improve SEO and drive more traffic to your website by visiting www.alexa.com.