Believe or not, in our everyday life, we’re judge by numbers. How much, how many is the common question asked. But life is not 100% about number. They’re a lot of other good thing such kindness, beauty, tasty which was unable to be measured by numbers accurately. This what makes life wonderful
But the situation is different on the net, where the blog and website are faceless . So this is how numbers came in handy to determine how good they’re and their owner. I have ideas to came out with a compilation of numbers that is recognized, widely used and very valuable to most webmasters when I do self-assessment. The list is not in order thought, but at least it paint a basic ideas of where you’re at.
Page Rank
It is the most sought after numbers among all. Page rank (or known mostly as PR) is a Google’s own proprietary technology to determine the importance of a website. Websites are ranked from 0 to 10. Only a handful of websites have PR10. Having higher PR will benefit you in many aspects such as traffic, how fast your page will be indexed, your ranking (not necessarily true), and most importantly, how much your site is worth in advertisement. Even though this is not 100% accurate, but in reality, page rank determines almost everything that you need.
But, before that, don’t forget to read Google Myth to
further understand it.How to increase your page rank. I’m not an SEO expert, but it has something to do with these things below.
- link building
- Inbound and outbound link
- Internal linking
- links from .edu domain
- link exchange
- buy text link ads
- Submit articles to article directories - The structure of articles which allows you to put your link at the end of your article, or known as resource box
- Submit your websites to web directories esuch as DMOZ and Yahoo
- Or, if you’re too lazy to do this, use 3waylinks.com
Webworkshop has a very long and detailed article explaining what page rank is. Be aware that this article is quite technical for most of us, including me. Other resources on which you can refer to are fellow Malaysian at easywordpress and webpronews.
Technocrati Authority and Rank
Technorati is the largest blog tracker. Getting into Top 100 will boost the traffic to your site. There are 2 kinds of ranking measurement.
According to Technorati -
- Technorati Authority - Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.
- Technorati Rank - It’s calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the highest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.
Blogjer has Authority 69 and is ranked quite low at 104,933. Too low compared to even newer bloggers. This is 1 area that blogjer needs to improve. How to increase your Technorati Rank?
Tips from Technorati seems to be too common.
- Tag your articles - use plugin such as Ultimate Tag Warrior. But for version 2.3, this is a built-in function, no need to worry about this
- Use multi ping service. The default ping is http://rpc.pingomatic.com/, which is the default setting in Worpress
- Join link-bait or link-train like this
- Create your own template and distribute it for free. Since the new way of calculating how much your Technorati Authority is by the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months, this is perhaps a quite efficient way to work on
- Use blog carnival. Does anyone know if this work?
Alexa
Alexa ranks your website among millions of websites out there. The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed. Although the ranking is somehow questionable due to it inconsistent and the method used to rank the websites, it is widely recognized and it is still useful to have a better rank in Alexa. There are ads company using Alexa to determine how much you will earn from your ads.
So far, Alexa is the only ranking that I manage to have a better ranking from time to time.
How to boost your ranking.
Dosh Dosh has very useful tips to get a better ranking in Alexa. Check out
SEOBook as well.
Digg
It’s the most successful and biggest social bookmarking service on the net.
How does it work?
Submit your favorites -> Become popular
Basically, if your submitted article being made a favorite, voted or ‘digged’ by visitors and it appears on Digg’s front page, as a return, you will get massive amounts of traffic flowing to your site. The key to be top of the list is the content, and the reader’s community.
Other than the massive power Digg has, Digg does not silent away from controversy. One of the them is ‘auto-bury’. Basically, auto-bury is a feature that automatically buries your post when it reaches a certain number of digg, however it still remains as a myth, since no one could prove that this really exists. There are a lot of stories about dig auto-bury feature in Digg that some blogs have experienced before such as
copyblogger, in fact,
pronet has an interesting finding on this issue.
For blogjer, I seldom digg my own content, I have little hope for blogjer’s content to appear on Digg’s front page based on the frequency of my posts and the way I write at the moment. I also understand that my current hosting is not Digg-proof, it won’t be able to support the massive traffic it will receive. But I still hope that 1 day, I’ll be able to write a killer article that would appear on Digg’s front page.
There are plenty of tips and discussion about Digg, these are some tips that I found to be the most beneficial to me.
Yahoo SiteExplorer badge
The badge queries Yahoo’s Site Explorer for the number of links to your site or page on the web. Almost similar to Alexa but it’s with less popularity. Perhaps Yahoo could do something to promote this tool after the take over battle with Microsoft is completed.
RSS subscriber
S chicklet shows how many readers are subscribing to your content. The number of readers is important especially to attract new visitors to subscribe to your feed. There is little debate on whether you should show the number of readers that you might have. Some said not to display it if your readers is less than 100, while others said 500.
Personally, I prefer to display the number of readers once it had reached 100. 500 is a long way to go. And if you notice, I haven’t displayed the number of readers that I have. So if you read this article, please subscribe to it immediately, so that I can display the RSS chicklet sooner.
There are plenty of ways on how to increase your RSS reader on the net. Among the notable is
- Display your RSS feed in a prominent position
- Put small notes at the end of you post to encourage user to subscribe to your RSS
- Offer full RSS instead of partial RSS
- Make the RSS registration short
- Use comment relish plugin to send email to first time commentator
- Use RSS Signature plugin to insert your notes of subscribing to your content, in case the read your content not from RSS reader
Izea Rank.
Izea Real Rank is the brainchild of the company behind PayPerPost (PPP). This idea is materialized after most PPP members were punished by Google by stripping/reducing the participants page rank. To be ranked, you’re required to register with them and install the provided script. I’m not a PPP member and have no clear visibility of how it works, and how this rank can help you in other areas except for PPP. But more or less, the tool provided statistical tool for your website. Unless your blog doesn’t have any stat script installed, you might one using this
Other than that, I’m curios how Google reaction against this ranking system and the participated websites. Since this ranking system was used to determine how much your website worth in PPP, could it give impression that all participant is PPP member who wrote sponsored post
How it is measured?
The system weights blogs 70% on daily unique visitors, 20% by daily active inbound links and 10% by daily page views as reported by ITK
Visitors online
This is a simple javascript that displays how many users are online. Even though this number is not that important, but it gives the impression to the newcomers that your blog is popular and has a lot of readers at any given time. Thus, it will influence new visitors to subscribe to your content.
