Just over a week ago I posted up that Alexa now have a Chrome extension for their toolbar and that it could possibly improve your Alexa rank.

I had many comments saying that it probably wouldn’t help and that improving the Alexa rank was down to other factors, so I thought I would post an update on whether there has been a change in the Alexa rank for my blog.

Over a period of months my rank was always around 78,000 and in a week of installing the Chrome extension it has got to around 67,500. Now that’s an improvement.

But the question is, is this caused by the extension or some other factors, hits to my blog have stayed around the same during the past week and commenting on the blog is also steady, so I’m not really sure, it does seem a bit of a coincidence that after installing the Chrome extension that there should be such an improvement.

My only conclusion, at the moment, is that it has indeed improved that to the use of the plugin, ok I may be wrong and I know a lot of you out there will be up in arms and saying, “This isn’t possible”, but, may be it is.

Over the next few weeks and months I will be watching my stats on both my blog and on Alexa and to see how it goes, I’m not saying it will get any better it may just stay where it is, or even worse drop. But it will be interesting just to see what actually happens.

So this is my current ongoing experiment. Have you done the same? Did you install the Chrome extension when I first posted about it and have you noticed any difference? I’d love to know

If like me you are one the many that has moved away from the likes of Internet Explorer and Firefox in favour of the faster and more streamline Google Chrome, then you may be missing a few of your favourite plugins.

One plugin that many have mentioned in the past for FireFox and Internet Explorer was the Alex Toolbar and a lot have said that having the toolbar helps improve your Alexa ranking.

There is a selection of Chrome Extensions for Alexa, but up until recently, I’m not sure how recently, the Alexa toolbar wasn’t really available for the Chrome browser.

Anywho I was over at Alexa checking out my stats etc and there were several sections saying that they were only visible with the Toolbar! “Oh Great” I thought, but on the off-chance I surfed to the Toolbar page to see if they had one for Chrome yet.

There it was on Alexa a version for my trusted Chrome.

So now you can have a handy icon on your Chrome browser that when clicked will give you the information for the website you are visiting without leaving the site. Hovering the icon will show you the websites Alexa Traffic Rank and clicking on it will show you the info from Alexa on the site you are on.

But Does This Improve Your Alexa Rank?

Well as you surf the internet the Alexa Chrome Extension will improve the ranking of the sites you visit, so in theory, as you visit your own blog writing comments, posting article and so on, you will be improving your Alexa rank.

So every little bit of surfing helps, I know what your thinking, why is improving your Alexa rank important?

Alexa is usually one of the first places that advertisers check to find out information about your website, so having a few nice stats does help you out and having the Alexa toolbar pulling in info for your site does help.

Also by using this it will also help Alexa build your related links as you visit a site and it has a link to yours, click on that link this will show the toolbar that a site is linking and vice versa

So there you go. Now I’m not an expert on these things, but I do know that when I used to use the Internet Explorer Alexa toolbar I did see a difference in my blogs Alexa ranking. So hopefully if Alexa Traffic Rank for Chrome acts in the same way, I should start seeing some improvements over the next few weeks or months.

Related articles

• How Does Alexa Rankings Work? (shoutmeloud.com)
• 10 Best Google Chrome Extensions for Marketers (quickonlinetips.com)

Have you ever seen those icons on Twitter? You know the ones, a plane, heart, star sign etc. Well there are several ways of adding these to your tweets when your on Twitter, but there is a great Chrome Extension which will give you a brilliant way of adding these Twitter Symbols when you are Tweeting.

Twitter Symbols will add an extra button next to the Tweet button on the Twitter website and will open an on-screen box allowing you to click on a Twitter Symbol to add to your tweet.

So all you have to do is click on the button and the selection box will open up, then you can simply add what you want to make your tweet a little different.

One thing I have noticed when using these Twitter Symbols though, is not all of them will be displayed on Tweetdeck, even with the option for International font/Twitterkey selected in Tweetdecks setting, but they do seem to work on Twitter itself

So by using the Twitter Symbols you can tweet a custom tweet like I have below:

♥ing the ☼ we've had today, shame that now we've ended having to use a ☂ on the odd occasion!

August 23, 2010 5:47 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@BlazingMinds

Karen

If you are looking for a way of using these Twitter Symbols and you are using Chrome then this is certainly a useful extension to use and ideal for any Twitter user

Now if like me you blog about websites now and again, then sometimes you like to take snapshot of a web page or even a portion of a website, in the past I have used some software to capture the screen and then edit it in PhotoShop.

Recently I came across a Chrome Extension called Aviary Screen Capture, this handy extension will add a button in your Chrome browser that when clicked will give you several options in capturing the screen that you have in your browser.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have to admit to that I’m probably a bit late when it comes to using Google Chrome full-time, I have used it in the past, but always fell back to FireFox, but, now I using Google Chrome over other browsers.

It all started with the update on FireFox to version 3.6.2, my system slowed down when I updated to this version and it was just getting on my nerves, I haven’t used Internet Explorer 8 for ages and never really liked it, so it was time to grab the latest version of Google Chrome and go from there.

Suffice to say, it was a bit daunting at first with a lot of the FireFox plugins I use not on Chrome, but thanks to a post by DragonBlogger, “Top 10 Google Chrome Extensions” which led me to a post by Rob, “My top 10 Google Chrome extensions I can’t live without” I found several extensions that would make my browsing better with Google Chrome, though I do miss some of my favourite plugins from FireFox, but the speed of Google Chrome is vastly better than FireFox and I’m browsing much more in the space of time compared to FireFox.

So for now, I’m quite happy to have Google Chrome as my default browser