While Part 2 of this series dealt with improving your visibility to a wider pool of readers, this post will look at the more impersonal side of blogging. If you are not interested in statistics and ranking, it will be of little interest, but if you rely on improved blog stats for making money, or you just like to measure your success, there will be some tips to get you started. The links below will take you to other posts of mine which discuss each issue in more detail.

As with most things in life, there is an honest approach to improving your stats, and a dishonest way (sometimes termed ‘blackhat’ as opposed to the ‘whitehat’ way of doing things correctly). I’m only going to mention the honest way of doing things, because ultimately tricking your way to the top, will just lead to a harder fall at the end. You will get found out, and you (or rather your blog) will suffer accordingly.

Lies, Damn Lies & Alexa

First of all, I’ll quickly run through the differences between the main types of stats that bloggers interested in raising their rankings need to be aware of.

• Readers: The number of people who actually read your blog as a separate entity, i.e. they have bookmarked your blog, or subscribed to your feed and return on a regular basis to see what you’ve written since the last time. There is no way to accurately gauge this figure at all, although if you use FeedBurner, you can find out the number of subscribers you have.
• Traffic: The number of visitors to your blog, which includes readers as described above, but also include visitors from search engines etc. These visitors may arrive and leave again in a short space of time, but never return. You can use a stats program to check the amount of your daily traffic, but none of the various systems available are known to be 100% accurate. An attempt has been made to quantify your traffic using the Alexa system.
• Alexa: Now owned by Amazon, this company has been quantifying the reach of a website for many years now, by establishing statistics purporting to show the percentage of the total users of the internet who actually visit your website. This figure has been used by most advertisers as a way to gauge a site’s traffic, which then governs the advertising rate they will pay you. This figure is ludicrously inaccurate as I’ll discuss below.
• Links: Literally the number of links from other websites pointing to yours. Generally, more is better, but the quality of the site linking to you, and the relevance of the link (i.e. the text either side of your link) is becoming increasingly important. Far better to get one link in a paragraph of relevant text from a PR4 blog, than 5 ‘click here’ links from 5 PR1 blogs. PR?
• Page Rank: Also referred to as PR is an arbitrary figure from 0-10 allocated to a website by Google. It is based on a logarithmic scale which is largely secret, and is known to be dependent on number and quality of links to a website. 0 is the lowest rank, and 10 the best, and the jumps between levels get increasingly large – going from 0-4 is easy, getting to 5 requires some effort, a 6 means a hugely popular blog and anything higher is very hard to attain. Again, this wouldn’t usually affect the average blogger, except that it is another metric used by advertisers – the higher your PR, the more they pay.

There are many other metrics, but they are all based on the above in some way – improve the big ones and the others will follow.

Increasing Traffic

Getting readers was something I dealt with more in the previous article, so here, I am talking about raw traffic in terms of numbers. Turning the traffic into readers will be down to the quality and appeal of your content. There are many ways to drive traffic using social networks, but far and away the easiest method is to get your content quickly and correctly indexed by the search engines (mainly Google of course).

The first, and most important job is to setup a sitemap and submit to Google, which is largely automated and takes less than 15 minutes. Next, make sure that the permalinks to your individual posts are saying something sensible. The default is to label each post ‘P1′, ‘P2′ etc. which is useless. They are easily changed to something more useful such as the post name for example. In addition to the permalinks, make sure you are also making the most of the WordPress Post Slug to get useful search engine friendly URL’s. Usually, a good post title will translate into a usable URL, but if you want something shorter, or you have a preferred post title that may not have the right key words in it, the post slug will do the job.

Finally, although the search engines don’t notice, optimising your post title will aid human readers using the search engines to find you.

Using these methods will help your posts to stand out when you write about a topic that people are interested in and searching for – by definition if a subject is popular, a lot of people will be writing about it, so you need your posts to show up quickly and clearly in the search results.

Links & Page Rank

There are many ways of achieving links back to your blog, some you pay for, some you can get for free, and the very best ones that are unasked for: the links from another blogger who so likes what you’ve written that they write about your post and link back to it from their blog.

Paid links: There is some debate as to whether the links you receive from directories that charge for a listing are worth it anymore, and it is something I have never done. I would suggest for now that you save your money and work on other ways to increase your backlinks, not least from using free directories such as Blocatalog.

The other ways to buy links are to purchase a text link upon a blog, using a company like Text Link Ads, or to buy a review from another blogger using Pay Per Post, ReviewMe! or a host of similar companies. There’s no doubt at the moment that these services can have a very beneficial effect upon your blogs Page Rank, but I would suggest that they give most value to blogs looking to eventually make money themselves.

Free links: There are plenty of opportunities for free links to be had from the likes of the aforementioned Blogcatalog and other free directories, as well as joining in many of the ‘memes‘ that do the rounds. The value of these links decreases for older blogs, but if your’s is brand new they will definitely help to get you going. You will find a lot of link exchanges and other similar ideas on discussion forums such the Blogcatalog discussions and other promotional ideas at forums like AuthorityBlogger. Again, these suit the brand new blogger more, as they will also give your traffic an initial boost.

Other ways of increasing your backlinks are to leave worthwhile comments on blogs that practice DoFollow on blog comments, which is something you can do yourself. Instructions for Blogger users are also available.

Using Your links To Improve Page Rank

As I mentioned earlier, the number and quality of links to your blog will directly affect your page rank. Things that Google doesn’t like are links from black-listed domains (dodgy directory sites that practice ‘blackhat SEO’) , hundreds of irrelevant links on a single page, and duplicate content.

Duplicate content usually arises when someone steals somebody else’s content lock, stock and barrel, and Google quite rightly punishes the offending site by not indexing the copycat content and maybe even expelling that site from it’s index. However, duplicate content can also be generated by your own blogging software, and the best way to prevent this happening is to use a robots.txt file. Simple to implement, it is a powerful tool, so caution is advised.

You may have already noticed that when you type in the URL of your blog, it doesn’t matter whether you include the ‘www’ or not you still reach your blog. But, did you know that Google treats the two sites as two totally separate sites, thus diluting your page rank, and also raising duplicate content issues? Solve this using a 301 re-direct, which I did after finding that www.blog-op.com had a different page rank from blog-op.com.

These two simple tips will ensure that every link you earn is contributing to boosting your page rank.

Alexa & Technorati

I described Alexa earlier as being ‘ludicrously inaccurate’. Why? Because Alexa stats are generated for your site only when one of your visitors is using the Alexa toolbar, a piece of software they install themselves which reports their surfing habits back to Alexa. Not many people would install what was classed as spyware for many years voluntarily would they? In fact the only people who tended to use the toolbar were those who wanted to lower their own Alexa ranking, and these people tended to be webmasters, and SEO types, not people who read personal blogs, art blogs or any other non-web niche blogs, meaning that the Alexa rankings were, and are, badly skewed in favour of certain types of sites. Fortunately there are ways you can boost your Alexa rank (legally), and by using the FireFox extension I link to, you can have a positive effect on your rank, and on other bloggers ranks. Since following the instructions in that post, my Alexa has dropped from 400K to what you can see today – See the Alexa box in my right sidebar.

Finally, Technorati measures a variety of factors, including incoming links, and gives your blog an authority ranking based upon them, which is again valued by advertisers. If you find that your authority rank is important to you in monetizing your site, you should be aware that Technorati no longer count links older than 6 months when determining your rank, which is why we all need to rejuvenate our links when appropriate. If you have not yet used Technorati, be sure to claim your blog, so that you can monitor your authority ranking, as well as adding some tags and information to your listing.

It’s up to you 

None of this is compulsory of course, and you can blog quite happily without doing it, but I have had measurable improvements in my stats each time I have implemented these tips, and as I look to make a little money from my blog, I can say that they have paid off for me. I hope they will do the same for you.