Written by Joeprah | 02 July 2008

You may have already seen, if you are a new or seasoned blogger, websites like Alexa and Technorati mentioned or linked to in some blogs sidebars or even their top navigation menu.  If you don’t know anything about Alexa or Technorati or if you know enough to understand you need to know more about each than this post is for you. 

When you start blogging you should have some goals for yourself.  All new sites start with a very low Alexa rank and zero authority.  To first have a goal to have more respectable numbers in these categories you first need to know what they are.

**Remember: Click my pictures**

Alexa Rank (Think Nielsens)

The first thing to do when you are trying to understand what “Alexa Rank” is, is to get the Sparky Alexa Rank Plug-in for Firefox.  Oh, if you don’t have Firefox—seriously, what are you thinking?  Get Firefox than the Sparky Alexa Rank Plug-in.  If you would like to stick with the regular toolbar, here is that link.  Alexa Rank is comparable to Nielsens Ratings on TV.  Think of it this way, like with Nielsens, folks with special devices connected to their TVs are monitored and their viewing habits are tracked.  Shows that have the highest ratings are ones with the most viewers.  Now take out TV in that example and replace it with Computers and replace shows with websites and that is Alexa.  The Alexa rank is simply data accumulated from across the net from folks who use the “Alexa Toolbar.”   The lower the rank, Yahoo.com is currently #1, the more clout your site has.  Go—install the Sparky tool bar, I’ll wait.  (♫ du-du-doo, du-du-doo-doo ♫)

Now that you’ve installed Firefox and Sparky you should see your Alexa rank at the bottom of your site and any site you visit.  Pretty cool huh?  Now let’s figure out how that rank is calculated so we can bring it up.

Alexa Rank – Improving Your Rank

The ingredients that make up your Alexa rank are Reach and Pageviews.  Joeprah…what the heck is reach?  Well, young padawan learner, reach is number of unique Alexa users that visit a site over the course of 24 hours time or one day.  To improve your reach there are a couple of key things you should make sure you are already doing.  First, is your website your homepage in your browser?  How about your browser at work?  Each individual IP is helpful in calculating your reach.  Next, make sure your readers know what the heck Alexa is (ahem, like I am doing right now) and if more of them use the Alexa toolbar—thusly—your reach will improve.  I am sure there are ways to game the system as far as reach goes, but I am too dumb witted to figure them out, but as for how to get more visitors to your site, it is all about strong content and marketing yourself.  (That’s next week)

As far as pageviews go, Alexa Rank calculates the amount of Alexa users that view a website’s pages.  It takes into account IPs for Alexa users so don’t sit there and refresh your website 100k times in one day and expect your rank to jump, it will only count the first time you visit a site’s URL.  Once again, it goes without saying that to have more pageviews you need strong content and it needs to be marketed in some way.

Technorati  – Authority and Rank

Technorati is an index of blogs—plain and simple. At Technorati they take indexing seriously and calculate the strength of blogs two ways: Authority and Rank.  Authority is defined as the amount of blogs that link to your blog in the past 6 months.  The more links you have the higher your “authority.”  The blog with the highest authority will also be the #1 ranked blog at Technorati.  How do I go about getting more links to my blog?  Like I mentioned with Alexa it all depends on two things: Content and Marketing.  If you’re content is strong and you are marketing it properly the rest will take care of itself. 

Why? 

Why worry about things like authority, rank and reach Joeprah?  You should worry about these things, as a blogger, if you are concerned with getting more traffic and turning said traffic into dollar bills.  The higher your rank the more you will be noticed by advertisers, marketing companies and more.  There are sites that determine how much you get paid for ads on your site simply based on your site’s rank. 

What’s next? 

Next week I will discuss content and marketing.  I may even discuss Google Page Rank if I am feeling spunky. 

Questions

What questions do you have about the topic?  Do you want to add anything?  Have you ever dropped you keys in a river of molten lava?

If you found this information helpful, feel free to rate recommend and comment this post at BuzzFuse.  Thanks!