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Put Your Web Browser On Steroids With The Right "Toolbar"
- by Jim Edwards
(c) Jim Edwards - All Rights reserved
http://www.thenetreporter.com
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As the Web grows more crowded and just plain "noisy" with information bombarding us from every angle, most people welcome any tool, trick or shortcut to help them wade through the mountains of data to find what they want.
Since your web browser represents your main window to the Internet, it makes sense for any tool which enables you to find what you need and get around faster online should sit right where you need it most... on your browser!
Introducing Web browser "toolbars," free little programs you download from the Web that work with Internet Explorer and Netscape to put you several steps closer to the information you need right now.
~ Google Toolbar ~
The free toolbar from search giant Google offers the best overall features of any toolbar we evaluated.
Not only does it allow you to search the web, but it also enables you to search within a website to find specific information.
The Google toolbar's main features include "Page Rank,"
which gives an indication of a website's overall value based
on your search criteria and other factors.
It also offers a "backwards links" function which allows you
to see which sites link to the website currently loaded in
your browser.
If you are looking to get traffic from other sites, you can
use the Google toolbar to find sites with high page rank AND lots of sites pointing to them. You can then go to each of
those sites you find in the backwards links and ask them to
give you a link too!
This is an AWESOME way to find potential new affiliates who already have their pages indexed in the search engines and are in the habit of giving links to other sites.
Simply pull up your competitor's website in your browser,
click the "i" button next to the PageRank meter, then click
the "Backwards Link" link to get a list of all the sites
Google indexes that link back to that website.
Start contacting them!
You can download the Google toolbar on your web browser by visiting http://toolbar.google.com and following the simple installation instruction.
~ Alexa Toolbar ~
Alexa's main claim to fame revolves around its traffic
ranking report on virtually any site on the Internet.
The lower the Traffic Ranking number, the more popular a
site rates in Alexa's eyes. Currently Yahoo, MSN and Google occupy the top 1,2 and 3 spots on Alexa's charts. Auction giant, eBay, occupies the #6 spot.
With so many websites on the Internet, an Alexa ranking of
less than 100,000 is considered good, and a ranking of less than 10,000 is considered outstanding as far as a site's relative popularity on the Web.
Alexa also offers a related links feature right on the
toolbar so you can quickly see links to similar sites other people also visit when surfing the site you currently have loaded in your browser.
For marketing, the real power of Alexa's toolbar comes into play when you combine it with Google's toolbar.
When you find a site with a high page rank AND a low Alexa rating, you know you've got a site you need to take a hard look at trying to get a link from or start recruiting their link partners as your affiliates.
Doing it this way will save you a ton of time when it comes
to finding potential affiliates and link partners because
those sites are highly qulaified, both for the amount of traffic they get and the type of targeted customers they attract.
Alexa's toolbar also offers a free pop-up blocker to help
cut down on pop-up windows.
You can download the Alexa Toolbar free from www.alexa.com
~ AltaVista Toolbar ~
Former search giant AltaVista recently jumped on the toolbar bandwagon with their offering at www.altavista.com
Though we didn't see additional features to help you with
your marketing, we did see a couple of things that were just plain cool!
The AltaVista toolbar offers a language translation button
and an MP3 search.
Click the "Translate" button and instantly translate entire
web pages from one language to another.
The MP3 search function will help you find the tunes you
want from AltaVista's audio index.
Most of the toolbars offer additional gadgets to help you
with everything from weather forecasts to currency
conversion.
Because they offer many of the same features and they take
up valuable screen space, using more than two toolbars at a time can prove impractical. Since most toolbars come free of charge, evaluate them all for their main features and overall usability for your particular needs, and then stick with the best one or two.
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Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist (http://www.TheNetReporter.com) and the co-author
of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how to use fr-e
articles to quickly drive thousands of targeted visitors to your
website or affiliate links...
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