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?

Broken Links

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. . ." Charles Darwin

This is probably one of my favorite quotes. And its application to business is endless.

These days, many businesses use the web as a primary tool for marketing. We spend fortunes and endless hours building our websites, creating links and then we forget about them. Did I mention change?

That article in the NYTimes is gone, that link to the local Chamber is broken, that picture of your acceptance speech is missing - your visitors hit a dead end. You spend the time developing interesting content and links - don't let your user experience end on a broken link.

Alexa.com offers a link report and it's free. I recommend you run it periodically to clean up broken links. The first time you run it - you maybe surprised at what you find.

Remember, change is a fact of life and a fact of the Internet!