Meet Alexa

We all spend plenty of money to launch our websites. We spend endless hours creating content and writing blogs. Why do we do this? Traffic, of course!

Sadly, many small businesses subscribe to the "If we build it, they will come" brand of online marketing. Like anything else in your business, to see if something is working, you have to measure it. That's where one of my favorite free web tools - Alexa.com - comes in. It provides you the page rank of your site (or any other site, for that matter), which reflects the amount of traffic running through your site.

You've launched a new SEO campaign, is it working? Check your page rank. You've sent a mailer, offering a discount to your web customers, again check the page rank to measure its success.

Some other nifty things at Alexa.com include a free broken links tool under the developer's corner. There is nothing more frustrating to your reader than to hit a broken link.

And the number one key to building traffic is in bound links. Alexa lets you see who links into your site (or who links into your competitors). Simply pull up the site info on your site and select Sites Linking in.

Did I mention it was free?