By now, most web marketers know that Alexa.com ranking of their site is important. It gives an independent measure of your monthly unique visitors and reach on web to potential advertisers.

To potential clients, it gives them a vehicle by which they can research your site, and if your ranking or reviews are favorable, an air of credibility as well.

Across web, a trend is growing- webmasters display their graphical ranking on front pages of their sites, and there has been a resurgence in reviews of websites on Alexa.com by average web surfer. Yes, all this is common knowledge even among many new to selling their wares online.

But did you know that there are other ways you can use Alexa.com to your advantage, specifically exploiting some of their latest changes to your advantage? Here are 8 of 9 ways I've used Alexa as my Personal Secret Traffic Weapon in first month of my latest website's life.

You probably already knew that Alexa Internet is owned by Amazon. But did you know that reviews done on Alexa are now being linked to Amazon.com? Or that new reviews appear on Amazon.com as part of your Amazon profile?

To use this to your advantage, you can create a new Amazon profile centered around theme of your site. You can even get an article printed on Amazon by filling out their "So You'd Like to..." guide or Listmania. And if your ebook/newsletter/book has an ISBN number, you can also partner with a web master in a parallel market and review each other's book. The possibilities are as endless as your current Amazon.com profile.

Use wordtracker to find high ranking sites for semi-popular keywords.

Find sites in top ten of those keywords that don't have rankings yet. Suggest your site and several others as related links. It looks like Alexa is changing this information for sites that already have links to "Sites Linking In". For now, Related Links Suggestion Box is still available for every site by going to: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/editor?type=rl&url=http://www.yoursitename here.com - I have a feeling this may go away from way they've started hiding it since yesterday, so do this step as soon as possible.

If you've done this before, try partnering up with another web marketer and suggesting each other's links to a pre-determined number of sites. Or use your personal Amazon.com profile to suggest your link for other sites and your new target profile to suggest links for other sites.

Get a free trial of wordtracker here: http://freetrafficdirectory.com/wordtracker

Find out your competitor's ranking.

What can you do with this, you may be wondering? Well, if you have a newsletter, you can create a link to your web site and page displayed could have your subscribers first name where ever you want it. It doesn't have to be their first name either; it could quite literally be any custom variable that your newsletter managing service/script/program has saved for each of your subscribers -- their last name, email address, snail mail address, gender, age, favorite color, etc.

But we don't have to stop there, not at all. You can go on and use as many variables as you want, not just one. We'll thoroughly cover this.

Why is this HTML tweak useful, you may now be asking? Just imagine this, you email your list of subscribers about a new product you have recently released. In your email, you write a few paragraphs about product to generate interest and conveniently provide a link for them to click on to go back to your website and read your full sales copy. Since you have such a trusting reputation with your subscribers, they give your product benefit of doubt and click on link to read more. When they get to your sales copy, lo and behold their name is used throughout page!

We all learned in Marketing 101 that your sales copy needs to be personal; that when you write it, you need to speak to one person and in everyday language. With this cool HTML tweak, you will be able to reach new levels of personalization. Yes, subscriber will be impressed that their name is used in middle of your sales copy, and yes, they will have more personal interest in what you are saying. It is a whole new experience at that point, because you are talking to them individually. Heck, you just used their name! It won't just be, "You will get big results!" but, "Fred, you will get big results!"

Now, let's get on to code! For this example, we are going to be using an HTML file named "choppers.htm".