Why does it matter?
So let’s start with “why does this technology stuff matter?” This post covers how to measure your efforts with your blog. It provides specific things you can do to check your blog and see how you’re doing.
If you’re just starting your blog you may find that you score quite low, but set a schedule and check these stats quarterly. Record your results. Use this information as a measurement stick: check your progress and motivate yourself to do better.
Check your score
- Hubspot – Hubspot provides wonderful blog resources. Their Website grader includes their blog grader. Do this first.
- Google Page Rank – Use the tool at PR Checker to check your page rank from Google. If you love your score you can download a site badge.
- Invesp – Search your blog name. If they have your blog you’ll see how you rank in your category and you can grab a badge code. If you’re blog doesn’t show up in the results, they may not be tracking your blog. You can submit you blog for tracking but be warned they say it takes 8-12 months to start tracking (Wah?!?)
- Technorati – Technorati’s blog ranking site ranks over 1 million blogs. Click here to search for your blog. I didn’t see a way to add a new blog.
- Adage – Adage’s has the Power 150. Adage actually tracks 1126 which is still a very small number of blogs considering there are millions of blogs out there. Nonetheless, if your blog is ranked you’ll see a lot of useful information on it’s scoring. There is a blog submission form, but when I tried it I suspected it wasn’t working.
- Alexa – Alexa tracks top sites, but probably also tracks your blog too. If you search for your blog it will provide your traffic rank and the number of incoming site links. You can click Details to get much more useful information on popular searches that lead to your site.
I find Hubspot’s grader to be very informative and Invesp to be a great way to see how site ranking works. The Invesp ranking provides rankings by:
- RSS feeds
- Unique monthly visitors
- Yahoo indexed pages
- Google indexed pages
- Number of incoming links (via Yahoo)
- Ratio of incoming links to number of pages
- Google page rank
Niche Blog Ranking
Perhaps your blog doesn’t garner a ton of traffic, that’s okay. You may find you can relevance within your audience – you don’t have to be big to be better. Look for sites that rank blogs within your industry. Here are a few examples:
Summary
Your blog may not find itself in the top 50 list, at least not to start, however, setting goals and tracking yourself against these goals is a great way to continually motivate you to stick with it. Producing and curating content is hard work and it’s nice to see tangible results from your work.
If you’re just starting out, find out who is ranking blogs in your category and set a goal of making that list!
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Photo credit: Travelin’ Librarian
