You’ve probably used Alexa, but have you tried Quantcast? Like Alexa, Quantcast provides traffic rankings for millions of websites. But unlike Alexa, Quantcast does not rely on toolbar usage for data collection. Instead, Quantcast’s ratings are based on the analysis of usage data collected through “affiliations with partners, who include advertisers, publishers, ISPs and advertising networks”.

Comparing Alexa and Quantcast results for some of my sites, I’ve found Quantcast to be light years ahead of Alexa in terms of accuracy and usefulness. Quantcast not only ranks your site, but tells you how many unique visitors your site gets every month as well as where they come from, their gender, ethnicity, age group, income and other demographic information.

You can use the impressively detailed demographic information provided by Quantcast to identify who your visitors are and cater your site content to their needs. Alternatively, if you find that your site is not reaching the right audience, e.g. your gardening site is being visited mostly by teenagers, you can use the data to modify your marketing strategies so that it reaches those who are more likely to buy your products and services.

Below is a sample Quantcast output.

Quantcast will attempt to provide information on any site you query– the more established the site, the more information it will be able to provide. But to get the most accurate and detailed information on your site, you need to sign up to become a Quantcast publisher (for free). You will get a short, invisible Javascript code to insert into your webpage. No button or logo is displayed, unless you want to display your Quantcast ranking on your site.

Visit Quantcast.

Any web developer can attest to the frustration with finding a suitable domain name for his or her website without having to shell out a small fortune to buy an existing domain.

The truth is, not all good domain names have been taken– you just have to be a little more patient and creative to find one.

One of my favorite tools is Instant Domain Search which tells you whether or not domain name is available — as fast as you can type it. Not only does the tool tell you the domain’s availability; it also gives you discounted prices to register the name through various registrars. Oftentimes, I can get a .com for $6.95 by following the link from Instant Domain Search to Godaddy, as opposed to going directly to Godaddy and paying $8.95 for the name.

iWebTool also has a similar instant domain checker. The domain tools can be accessed under “Tools >> Domain Names” on our SEOPal Toolbar.

Online classifieds are a powerful marketing tool often overlooked by webmasters. Classified sites like www.craigslist.org and www.backpage.com receive enormous traffic from people looking to buy and sell various products and services.

Our toolbar lists about a dozen of the most popular online classified sites on the web. Just click on the “Resources” component and go to “Classifieds”.

Placing an ad is not as difficult as you might think. In fact, much of Craigslist’s popularity is owed to the site’s fast, no-nonsense design and the ease of ad placement, not to mention that it ranks #47 in traffic of the 100 million sites on the web (according to Alexa, at least).

Please download and install our SEOPal Toolbar if you haven’t done so already.

It’s about that time of year again when Google is updating its toolbar PageRanks.

Did you know you can get a glimpse of your future PageRank by checking your PR on multiple Google datacenters?

Most of the time all the datacenters return the same PR for a site. However, during the two weeks or so that it takes Google to update the PageRanks, the datacenters may return different values, giving you a glimpse of any changes to your PR.

I’m not talking about a PageRank prediction tool here. Unlike PR prediction tools, which are almost never accurate, this method is usually right on the money. The only drawback is that it works only during the one- to two-week span while the PR update is taking place.

To check your PR on multiple Google datacenters, go to “PageRank” under the the “Tools” tab. Then select any one of “Future PageRank - SEOChat.com”, “Live PageRank - Raketforskning.com”, or “PageRank Checker - iWebTool.com”. Any of these tools give you PRs on multiple data centers.

Please download and install our SEOPal Toolbar if you haven’t done so already.