Do you have the Google and Alexa toolbars installed on your browser? If you don’t it would be a great idea. These two toolbars are great research toolds, and a great indication at where your site is at. Let’s look at what each one does:

Google Toolbar:

You can search google directly from your browser. The greatest feature of the google toolbar is the PageRank. PageRank is a rank out of 10 that google gives you rating how much authority your site has. By this I mean backlinks to your site. The higher the pagerank of the sites that links back to you will determine how high your pagerank will be. Also it includes, a spell checker, backward links (who links to you), and some other cool tools. I would highly recommend installing it on your browser.

You can download it here:

Google Toolbar

Alexa Toolbar:

This toolbar also has the search function, but what you want to highly focus on is the Rank. Every page you visit will display a different rank. What alexa does is tracks how much traffic your site receives and gives you a ranking. The highest traffic site would be 1 (which is Yahoo currently). This is also a great tool that I’d recommend.

You can download it here:

Alexa Toolbar

Now you might be wondering “Great, but how will this help me in research?” Well, if you have a clear indication on which sites receive a lot of traffic then it’d be a great idea to learn from them. If someone claims they get a lot of traffic to their site, and want to sell you a product, but they only have an alexa ranking of 3,000,000 then it’s quite obvious they’re lying. If you go to a site like Brad Callen’s SEOelite and notice that he has an alexa ranking of 1,840. It’s quite obvious that he knows what he’s doing.

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