WebRev Blog

As we discussed yesterday, Backlinks, along with feed subscriptions, traffic, Alexa ratings, and page rank are some industry standards for evaluating blogs.  Today, lets talk about Rankings - Alexa Ratings and Google Page Rank.

Alexa

Alexa is a very popular rating system used by advertisers to decide if they want to pay to advertise on a particular site.  To find your Alexa rating, go to Alexa.com/siteinfo, and enter the URL, then "Get Details."  This will show you your traffic rank, which is:

A measure of a website's popularity. 

 

The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1.

So, the lower your traffic rank, the better.  Clicking on "search analytics," will also tell you which search engine queries sent the most traffic to a website.

Google Page Rank

Google Page Rank is explained by Google as:

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance.

The actual effect of a website's page rank on the amount of traffic driven to the site by Google is somewhat disputed, but the page rank is still looked at as a factor, industry wide, in determining how popular a site is compared to other sites (e.g. Top 100 Church Blogs).

Tomorrow, we'll talk about feed subscriptions.

Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is a trainer and tech writer in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. Her weakness is the mocha frappuccino.

How do you determine if a blog or website is "successful"?  Well, if it's your blog or website, you largely get to set the goals, and determine for yourself if those goals have been met.  However, if you think you might eventually want to attract advertisers, you'll at least need to be aware of what standards and measures are used in the industry to rank and evaluate blogs.  These include backlinks, Alexa ratings, feed subscriptions, traffic, and page rank.

One of those standards is the number of "backlinks," which include the number of times other bloggers or webmasters have linked to your site, as well as the number internal links (links from one post or article to another within the same site) there are on your site.

There are a number of tools online for seeing how many people are linking to you.  Your own stats program should provide you with information about which websites are sending traffic to yours  (also see What You Can Learn from Your Stats).  Two free tools online are the iWebTool backlink Checker, and the Yahoo Inlinks Site Explorer.  The iWebTool will check only sites from external sources.  Yahoo gives you a choice of whether you want to include links "from all pages," or "except this domain." 

So, what can you do with this information? 

It's always a good idea to know who is linking to you.  Checking your backlinks will help you to know who is driving traffic to your site, and who is writing about your site.  Following those backlinks, then commenting on the linking blogs (perhaps also linking to those blogs, if appropriate) is a great way to build a network.  Increasing the number of backlinks to your site will improve your page rank - a topic we will discuss later in this series. 

Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is a trainer and tech writer in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. Her weakness is the mocha frappuccino.