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There are three toolbars that you should be aware of when doing marketing reconnaissance:
Google toolbar - this will tell you the Google Page Rank of a page. Page Rank, as we know from reading merchant services, is Google's measure of the importance of a page. To evaluate importance, the page rank tool examines how many other Page Ranked sites are linking to a specific page, as well as the rank of the linking page (The higher the rank of the page linking in to you, the more credit you get in Google's system).
The Google Toolbar can be found at http://toolbar.google.com
Alexa toolbar - this toolbar is useful for several reasons: First, Alexa's traffic ranking tool gives a traffic ranking to the top 8 million visited sites. i.e. if yoursite.com has 45 visitors a day you might be ranked 2,000,000 or so, and if someoneelsessite.com has 46 they might be ranked 1,999,999.
Secondly, it assists in finding vertical portals. The Alexa toolbar has a related links function. Once you have found one vertical portal dealing with your particular subject matter, related links will display similar sites, i.e. more vertical portals.
The Alexa toolbar can be found at http://www.alexa.com/site/download/
Note: the Alexa toolbar is not available for Firefox users. See below for a Firefox equivalent.
Compete toolbar - Compete is similar to Alexa. It will give you Compete's traffic ranking for the site you are viewing. Their traffic ranking is the same type of ranking as Alexa's. It will also tell you approximately how many unique visitors a site has had in the last month, which Alexa does not tell you.
The Compete toolbar can be found at http://toolbar.compete.com/
For Firefox Users - There is a fourth utility that provides the functionality of all three of the toolbars discussed above, however it is only available to Firefox users. It is called SearchStatus, and their address is http://www.searchstatus.com/br>
Taken from the SearchStatus website:
"For every site you visit using, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Compete.com ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. This combined search-related information means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa), so providing a balanced view of site efficacy."
SearchStatus does not display as you are used to seeing toolbars display. It appears at the bottom of the browser on the status bar.
See you next time!
Sean Guy
Director of Customer Service
StoresOnline, Inc.
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