Alexa Rank, Page Rank, and other Blogging Numbers

There are a few numbers that are important for your blog. They attract and keep advertisers. If you have installed the stat programs we discussed in the statistics for your blog post then they are also easy to find. Here are the numbers you need to know:

Google Page Rank. This is a number 0-10 that is given to every site on the web. The exact formula in finding page rank is unknown, but it has to do with relevant links in, the age of your site, the quality of links in (including anchor text, the words that are linked to your site), and more. However, it is primarily about links in. Page rank used to be the number one thing in determining important web pages, but it is not used as much anymore. You will still have advertisers ask about it occasionally though so keep it in your media kit. You can check your page rank at prchecker. If your blog is unknown, or punished, then you will be ranked a 0. The higher your rank is the harder it is to get to the next level. Each page on your site has a page rank (the homepage might have a different rank than a post page).

Alexa rank is becoming more popular. The alexa rank is a ranking system of all sites. It starts at #1 and goes into the millions. Your site is ranked based on traffic. Every time a person with an alexa bar shows up at your site it is a “vote”. The past three months of traffic gives you a number and that number is ranked against all the other sites on the web. There are a few good cut-off points for an alexa rank. I have seen under 300K being good, under 150K, and under 100K so you can keep those as mile markers for yourself. You need to install the Alexa toolbar for yourself. It will increase your own rank plus Alexa has quite a few other tools that you can use to help your blog along. Unlike Google, which has a different page rank for every page on your site, your Alexa rank is the same for all of your pages. Advertising with Adgitize helps your Alexa rank since most of those members are also bloggers who have the Alexa toolbar installed.

Page views and unique views are two other things that you will need to keep track of. In statcounter it will be the very first number you see (in graph form). You can change the time frame to see how many you have gotten in the last year, month, quarter, or day. Advertisers want the number per month. In Analytics it is also the first number you see. You can change the date range to anything you want to see how your traffic has changed. Page views are how many times your page has been seen and unique views is how many people have seen your blog. Page views are important for button and text ads since they want their ad seen many times. Uniques are important for product reviews since they are trying to reach a large amount of people.

TASK – Install the alexa toolbar and look up the google page rank of your site.

Today you can gain an extra entry into the giveaways by blogging about this series.

Tomorrow I will suggest further reading materials.