The Honest Way

It could easily become an obsession, if I were an obsessional type of person. Thankfully, I’m not obsessional (honest!), but I can see how addictive something like this can be.

I’m taking about statistics or more precisely blog/website statistics.

What got me started on this train of thought is that little pair of bars on the bottom right hand corner of my Firefox browser window that keep me informed as to the state of both my Alexa and Google Page Ranks. Well, the Google one is still all white for this blog, which means the don’t love me (…yet) despite it’s been around for several months now. The Alexa bar is more interesting to me at the moment because unlike the Google PR bar, it gives me (and anyone else who has one) a reasonably accurate assessment of the volume of traffic flowing to this blog.

Let’s take them one at a time and expand on what I’ve just written. If you’re fairly new to this and haven’t had it explained to you yet, this should put you straight.

Google, being the biggest and most used of all the search engines exerts a lot of weight when it comes to defining a website/blog’s “popularity” as far as all the other websites/blogs are concerned. Google spiders the whole web and looks at every web page in cyberspace (eventually) and follows links to and from those pages. It also takes into consideration the quality and quantity of content on each page and then runs that page through its top secret algorithm to determine the importance (in google-speak) of said page on a sliding scale of zero to ten (the higher the number, the more importance is placed on the page).

Now a lot of people aren’t too worried about the Page Rank (PR) that google assigns to a web page, as long as it is pulling in sufficient visitors (or traffic, in web-speak) and they are earning whatever they think is a reasonable amount from their efforts - or whatever it is they have a website for. That’s fine if you’re income streams don’t include revenue from advertising, but if it does (or you would like it to), then that PR is important to the advertisers. They see it as a signpost to the websites or blogs that will potentially have the highest traffic and therefore the biggest possible exposure for any advertisment they have a mind to expose. The higher the PR, the more money the advertisers can beconvinced to part with for running their ad on your blog or website!

Now let’s move on to the second bar - Alexa. Alexa is a different type of web analysis tool which allocates its page rank according to the number of actual visitors to a website or blog. Those numbers are gained from people who already have the Alexa toolbar plugged into their browser, a bit like pollsters who obtain their figures from a pool of people commissioned from a cross section of the population to take part in their poll.

Some advertisers have cottoned on to the fact that the Alexa rank of a website or blog is potentially a much more accurate pointer of the level of traffic a site actually gets than the Google PR alone. For them, this means higher viewer figures of any ads they place with these sites. The rest still firmly and steadfastly stick to the Google PR as their yardstick.

Of course a combination of high Google PR and Alexa rank is liquid dynamite to advertisers and like bees round a honey-pot they’ll be beating a quickly worn path to your door with open cheque-book in hand for the privilege of being permitted a piece of your coveted advertising space.

Oh my, I’m dreaming again…

What all this boils down to is the almost blinkered obsession some site/blog owners have with those two little bars at the bottom of their browsers. Because they know that as soon as one of both of them start to move in the right direction (more green for Google, more blue for Alexa), the better chance they have of procuring some of that lucrative advertising revenue for themselves via their site/blog.

What’s mine? I already said my PR is zero for this blog, although the website’s homepage has managed to muster a huge PR1! I trust that will change in the very near future. As for Alexa, that’s much more exciting for me. Just today it just got a little better and now stands at 103,789. With Alexa, the lower the number, the better the rank.

If you’re new to this, you may think that’s a high number. Well, consider most newish sites/blogs start with an Alexa rank at around five million and you get some idea of how well this blog is doing! Anything below 100,000 is good and means your blog is probably getting better than 3-400 visits per day. This blog is already receiving above 300 visits a day and heading in the right direction.

Once this blog gets up to 500 visits a day, I’ll have reached one of my milestones and will be able to look forward to improved monetization. That’ll inspire me to work towards the next milestone of a thousand visitors a day.

Is it honestly possible? Of course it is!

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY