Wel­come to my new “How To Blog” series! In this series, I’ll try to put my knowl­edge to good use and shed some light on the basic of blog­ging. You will learn how to set up a self-hosted blog, what are the must-have plu­g­ins, how to attract read­ers, how to mon­e­tize your blog etc. I’ll pub­lish a new “How To Blog” post every Saturday.

Who loves you? Yeah, prob­a­bly a bunch of real life peo­ple. But blog-wise, who is you friend and who isn’t?

Today, we will explore the dif­fer­ent tools you can use to assess your blog rank­ing. Is your blog pop­u­lar? Easy to find? High-ranked? Fol­lowed by reg­u­lar read­ers or one-time visitors?

Your blog’s posi­tion on the web is assessed daily by var­i­ous sources, among them:

• Google, and its famous Page Rank
• Feed­burner, and the num­ber of your subscribers
• Tech­no­rati and the num­ber of inbound links
• Alexa, which pro­vides infor­ma­tion on web traffic

Google love: the famous search engine uses a very com­pli­cated algo­rithm to “mea­sure” the impor­tance of your web­site in the web. Basi­cally, you PageR­ank will be deter­mined by the num­ber and PageR­ank met­ric of all pages that link to your web­site (“incom­ing links”). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageR­ank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page, there is no sup­port for that page.

PageR­ank are updated every few months… the last time was in Feb­ru­ary 2008 but no one can really pre­dict the updates. PageR­ank updates are known to bring good news to some and bad to oth­ers. Late 2007, blog­gers who used Pay Per Post or sim­i­lar ser­vices were slammed by Google and a lot of them, if not all, lost their PageRank.

How do you get a high PageR­ank? Some invest on their PageR­ank by buy­ing links from high-ranking web­sites, some try to game the sys­tem and use black hat SEO, some just exchange links… there are many tech­niques out there. My best bet would be: work on your con­tent and on your web­site and you’ll be just fine. It seems use­less to me to link to a bunch of irrel­e­vant web­sites which will, ulti­mately, reduce the qual­ity and rel­e­vancy of Google search results. I didn’t know about PageR­ank at all until I reached PageR­ank 4 and trust me, I didn’t do much for that. Give it a bit of time, exchange links with blog­gers in your niche and chances are, you will see your PageR­ank raise. And won’t get a headache in the process.

You can check your PageR­ank with the fol­low­ing tools:

• PageR­ank Checker
• Check PageR­ank of inter­nal pages in your blog

Count your sub­scribers with Feed­burner: Feed­burner repub­lishes your blog’s feed to make it more usage-friendly, it allows you to fol­low your RSS feeds and track usage of your sub­scribers. The ser­vice is free: you just need to sign up and “burn your feed”. You will then be able to see sub­scribers’ stats (who read what, when etc.), opti­mize your feed (make it browser-friendly, build inter­ac­tiv­ity etc.), pub­li­cize it (ping a bunch of web­site for exam­ple)… and even mon­e­tize it. Worth a try, doesn’t it?

A cou­ple of tools might enhance your Feed­burner experience:

• The Feed Analy­sis (a free detail report of your feed)
• The Feed­burner Feed­smith plu­gin for Word­Press (detects all ways to access your feed and redi­rect them to FeedBurner)

Tech­no­rati and the links: Tech­no­rati is a search engine for blogs, and prob­a­bly the most pop­u­lar around. It counts the num­bers of unique links to your blog in a given period and rank you. Even if you don’t make it to the top page (seri­ously, who does?), it’s a use­ful tool to see who linked to you. Who added you in a blogroll? Who quoted your post? Who tagged you? A lot of blog­ger don’t men­tion it and it sounds like a good way to find out!

Have a look at:

• Tech­no­rati wid­gets (to dis­play your Tech­no­rati rank on your blog, for example)
• For fun, check how much is your blog worth (er… where can I claim my $63,000?)
• Hack to add Tech­no­rati incom­ing links in Word­Press dashboard

Alexa, the traf­fic queen: Alexa pro­vides infor­ma­tion on web traf­fic to other web­site. It gives a pop­u­lar­ity based rank­ing, which is achieved by users adding a search tool on their web­site. Alexa then tracks where you go and com­piles the infor­ma­tion into rank­ings based on the num­ber of hits to each site. This tool is mostly a “big guys’” tool though, since most of us don’t really com­pare traf­fic… and you need a lot of it to have rel­e­vant data showing!

You can still down­load the Alexa tool­bar for Inter­net Explorer or Fire­fox (gives you infos about the web­site you’re visiting)

And let’s not for­get about a few addi­tional free online SEO tools you may use to check your blog sta­tus and improve it:

• Web­site Grader, a great tool to mea­sure your mar­ket­ing effec­tive­ness. It’s very easy to read, includes some good tips on the report and it’s free. I love it!
• Domain pop­u­lar­ity, an online tool that lists all your backlinks
• Web­site speed and load­ing time, when you think a bil­lion of wid­gets might be too much, this tool will con­firm it!
• SEO tool­box, includes pages indexed, domain age etc.

So, what are you wait­ing for? Go check how awe­some is your blog!

Related posts:

1. 20+ Tools For Your Blog (9÷10)
2. All About Blog­ging: 5 Ways to Pro­mote your Blog
3. All About Blog­ging: Blog Mon­e­tiz­ing, What Works Best?
4. The Art Of Pro­mot­ing A Blog (4÷10)
5. Mak­ing Money With Your Blog (7÷10)