Of course you can have a look at your Google Analytics and Wordpress Stats to get a feeling how popular your blog is, but there are other great tools out there that you should use to optimize your content and analyse how popular your blog really is.

The first tool I would like to mention is popuri.us. You just enter your domain name there (one time with www and one time without, because results may vary) and popuri.us shows you several statistics. The two most important ones are your Google PageRank and your Alexa Rank. Google’s public PageRank is a figure between 0 and 10, with ten being the most relevant sites rated by Google. Pagerank for tobman.com is currently … well, 0.

BUT - I checked my popularity today with popuri.us and to my delight I saw that tobman.com for the first time in history has a Alexa Rank! Alexa is web service company that provides a toolbar for browsers. I haven’t used it myself yet, but apparently some million others do this and by doing so provide statistics what webpages they are surfing to. Alexa aggregates this data and calculates a Rank for each site. And now I’m proud to announce that tobman.com is among the TOP 10 Million webpages of the world. Great stuff. I think as soon as you have reached the TOP 100.000 things start to make fun, but that’s a looooong way to go I’m afraid.

Anyway, you can check your Alexa Rank and several other interesting statistics about your website directly here.

Blogging, Search Engine Optimization Alexa, Blog, PageRank, Popularity

Ok, with all that baking, coding and blogging yesterday I almost forgot about Project WebMoney. Well only almost… Of course I had to check the traffic statistics for my four websites and here are the results:

tobman.com: PR 0, about 120 visitors/day +1200 %

django.at: PR 3, about 20 visitors/day +/-0%

videopodcast.tv: PR 0, about 5 visitors/day +25%

advertbreak.com: PR 0, about 5 visitors/day +25%

If you compare this to the figures just two days ago you will notice one major difference: tobman.com is going through the roof! Two things that are remarkable: First Google’s webcrawler Googlebot is really fast - those new blog entries have been indexed within a couple of hours! How do I know? Because from the referring information of the logs I can already see that people were looking for things such as “setting up cakePHP on Mac OS”. And that article didn’t even exist 24 hours ago… And that’s second: it actually seems that the content I have been providing through my blogging so far seems to be relevant to some people out there. Great. Really great.

What also can be seen that the PageRank hasn’t changed so far on any of the sites. This is not surprising because the public Toolbar PageRank (the one that we can see) is only updated about every 3 months or so. But we see some changes in the traffic of videopodcast.tv & advertbreak.com - although nothing impressive it looks like that some of the readers of my blog actually visited those sites to see what’s on there currently.

The whole project WebMoney hasn’t been started more than 35 hours ago and to be honest those interim results is much more than I expected! Let’s continue the work and see what happens!

Project WebMoney Googlebot, PageRank

So, I wrote just a couple of minutes ago that it might not be such a bad idea to blog my entire project and give regular updates. This actually seems to be true!

This article (mind the English) has some interesting points:

• It should take about 3 months to increase a page rank by 3 points
• Blogging is a good way to increase the page rank
• Your blog should be integrated in your main site (to share the Page Rank)

I’m really curious whether it will be possible to increase page ranks of my sites by 3 points within the next couple of months… but as this sounds like a nice goal, I’ll set it anyway! So… django PR 6, all others PR 3!

Search Engine Optimization PageRank, Search engine optimization