Page Rank
First and foremost, the easiest to measure is Google’s Page Rank. Masses of systems measure you by this ranking, but in reality, it does not actually say anything about your website. A high Page Rank does not guarantee visitors and a low Page Rank site could get heaps of traffic.

So yes, on most systems where you are trying to earn money, the higher your Page Rank the better you will do, but aside from that it is only a badge to wear.

Number of Backlinks
Most systems that report this measure Yahoo backlinks, because Google displays a lower answer whereas Yahoo seems to report every link it finds.

Again, it could be a pointless measure of success. It is quite straightforward to get ample of low ranking sites pointing to your website and it does not guarantee success. But advertisers like to see high backlink counts in the hope that they will also gain benefit from a mention on your pages.

Technorati Ranking
If it worked fully, this might be a half decent measure. It includes merely links from the content of other websites, taken from their RSS feeds. So comments and link sites are excluded. You then get allocated a Technorati Authority based on your relative position in terms of how loads of new links they have found for your website in the past few months.

So again, it is merely a way of counting links. But so numerous good blogs are unable to get themselves listed that not having a Technorati Authority should not really mean anything.

Alexa Ranking
At last – not a measure of links! Using the various Toolbar Button and the Alexa widget, this system could count how many traffic your website has and then rates you against other sites, worldwide and locally. It is also able to capture information about search terms and several other bits.

An excellent idea and a good measure, if just it was not so distorted! Because it depends on the installation of the Toolbar Button or the site Alexa widget, not all visits are recorded. Only those technical people with an interest have installed the Toolbar Button, so the counts are limited.

Actual Visitor Stats
This is the merely true way of measuring whether a blog is actually successful, but not something that often happens. The problem is that it requires extra code to be inserted to the header of the code to track traffic. Extra code that slows down the loading of the page. And this extra code is needed for every monitoring system. Not really efficient!

In conclusion, for a blog to be successful as a paid website, it needs a lot of good links back from other web-sites. Work on this correctly to also drive visitors to your site and you have everything covered.

Written by Keith Lunt of How To Start My Blog. Call in if you need any help or advice with starting a blog.

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