SEO Lesson: Bloggers’ Page Ranking – Why Authority isn’t quite the same as “Power” … Apart from checking Alexa.com stats weekly or so (was told it isn’t accurate now, as Google is now adjusting its ‘page ranking machines’ again), I have never really dived into my blog’s stats…till today. I decided to pick another blog to do some “case studies” of my own. Like a lot of bloggers and webmistresses, I am curious to find out my blog stats. So I played around with some online SEO tools. After I reset the WordPress Wassup Plugin I waited for about 90 minutes…
before I looked at charts/graphs. On average this blog gets 2 page clicks per unique visitor, ie. 3 page views per visit. (Alexa.com is currently a little ‘off’ showing 1.3 page views per visitor.) Of course, top sites do better like minimum of 8 to 10 page clicks per visit.
Perhaps the most valuable information the Wassup plugin could give me is:
- the keywords leading visitors to my blog and
- the search engines and URLs through which visitors found my blog
To re-use those keywords in future blog entries may give me more visitors searching for those same keywords again via search engines and bookmarking sites.
Other stats I looked at: Page Rank
Google gave me a page ranking of 3. Understandable as I have more than 200 blog entries compared to Gathersuccess.com’s blog.
Does it mean I am getting more visitors than GatherSuccess.com?
The above shows page reach over the last 3 months – therein lies the difference between ‘Page Ranking’ and ”Page Reach’. Having a little (or a lot of) authority is not quite the same as having “power”! I wasn’t getting more visitors because of my page rank- my page reach SUCKS! (Cartoon: Handing the pacifier to Google Junior.)
A website/blog viewed as having some authority (my current Google rank is 3) does not mean that my blog is reaching out to a lot of people.
Why is GatherSuccess having more page reach?
Gathersuccess.com was getting more visitors and having more reach than my blog. This is because GatherSuccess.com (a few reasons but may not be all):
- constantly promotes their blog, affiliated sites and products through different mediums including word-of-mouth
- has more time to build their base of subscribers since 2006 and
- encourage bloggers to subscribe by offering FS (not ‘f-shit’, it’s ‘free stuff’..a free ebook) that made visitors return to their blog again and again
- and of course they use whitehat SEO tactics.
Yesterday a visitor told me my blog showed #5 for “blog skins” in Google, and #1 for “free download blog skins” in Yahoo. I am not sure if organic search results stay the same in search engines so I took a snapshot of the one from Yahoo;
That meant I beat 81,600,000 other websites and blogs that had about the same “blog skin” content as me (via Yahoo).
I was almost fooled into thinking page ranking is everything, but can you imagine what a blogger can achieve when good page ranking and good page reach are both achieved?
Now, it’s your turn to say something! What blogging stats do you look at? And what can you conclude?
Related Info:
Using Google Analytics for SEO
