Identifying Growth and Popularity on the Internet
I’ve decided to gather up a short list of tools that are useful in giving you an idea of how popular your website actually is. You may already be familiar with one or more of these, but if you are a newbie webmaster, these may be just the tools you need.
Google PageRank
PageRank is Google’s patented term that is used to describe how important that they believe a page to be on the Internet. This value is not assigned to the website as a whole, but rather to the individual pages contained within it. Click here to read a previous article that I wrote regarding this holy number.
- The Google Toolbar shows the PageRank of any page you are currently viewing.
As a webmaster, PageRank should be more important to you than anything else on this list, but it’s not the most accurate depiction of success. Realize that PR is only a number from zero through ten, and it’s only updated every few months, so there are much better tools to use for short-term indications of growth. Moving on…
Alexa Traffic Ranking
Alexa is a web-based company that tracks information from people all over the world that have their toolbar installed. Alexa tracks a variety of statistics for [almost] all websites, and it ultimately assigns each website it’s own traffic ranking. For example, Google is currently ranked #1, while as of this writing, this site is ranked #4,257,978. In my own defense, I just acquired this domain about a week ago, and the Alexa ranking is based on the past three months worth of data, so I have nowhere to go but up for the next few months.
As stated before, Alexa can only gather data from people who have their toolbar installed. Thus, the lower your traffic ranking, the less accurate it is.
Analytical Software
Piwik and Google Analytics are my two favorite stat-tracking software applications that simply provide you with a snippet of code to include in all pages that you would like tracked. From there, you log into their web interface and can instantly view visitor information from dozens of different angles. This offers you perfectly accurate and up to date information which can be viewed at any time.
If you are a webmaster relying on things like awstats and Webalizer alone to reveal your visitor information, I strongly advise that you look into a more advanced solution. I have installed Piwik on my web server, and I made my traffic information publicly viewable, so if you are interested in a demo of just how much information it gathers, check out Piwik.
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools is an absolute must. The majority of your organic traffic will most likely be coming from Google, and with this tool you will be able to gain information that cannot be found anywhere else. Google will provide you with a list of your site’s keywords, a detailed list of search queries that generated clicks to your website, and a list of relevant incoming links. You can use this information to your advantage, essentially “sculpting” your website to be friendly with Google.
As a webmaster looking to direct more visitors to your website, it would be to your greatest advantage to make your site compatible with Google’s spider, Googlebot, and that is one of the main reasons that Google created this wonderful application.
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Great read, Joe. I am really interested in getting Piwik after reading this.