Although I surf the net almost daily, sifting through search results to find the most appropriate sites to answer my query can be a harrowing experience. My hobby is to trade cars and I find that several online classifieds catering to the buying and selling of cars do show up on the first page of Google but are often quite outdated and not frequently visited. That was until a friend of mine told me about Google Pagerank and Alexa.

Despite unfounded reservations, my friend convinced me to switch browsers and use Firefox instead. In hindsight, it was a great move and I realized that not only was Firefox faster, it also saved the sites I had open in multiple tabs and reopened them for me when I restarted the browser. We then downloaded and installed Alexas site ranking and Googles Pagerank toolbars.

Alexa is a renowned service for ranking websites globally on their daily traffic. The higher the number of visitors the higher the ranking. The statistics are displayed at the bottom of the browser in the form of a graph and numerical ranking and alongside each website in the search results on Google in the form of a green bar. You can roll your mouse over the bar to see the actual ranking.

Pagerank ranks websites on their authority by using a combination of sites linking into a particular website, freshness of content, age of the site and the volume of visitors. It ranks sites on a scale of zero to ten with ten being the best score. It is normally displayed in the upper section of your browser. Unlike Alexa, several websites can achieve the same score and the scores are update after longer intervals of time.

The aim is to use the most appropriate keywords, like cars for sale, and locate sites that are rank well with in toolbars. I give Alexa priority as it shows me websites with frequent daily traffic and hence is a good indicator of car websites and classifieds that have fresh ads every day. I soon discovered that sites on the second and even third page often had a larger number and variety of ads for cars on sale. I got to explore new and far more useful sites and soon had a large resource for different cars and their prices. Finding a better deal became a whole lot easier.

This technique of searching for used cars can be applied to all your searches so the benefits are manifold. Sites that I would never found due to my reluctance to go past the first page on Google are now part of my group of website that I visit several times in a day. Try it out for yourself, especially if you’re looking for great deals on the net.