Lorelle’s Blog Challenge: Testing Your Blog’s Development
Lorelle has another Blog Challenge: Testing Your Blog’s Development
These are my results. Most of them don’t surprise me (I am a nobody in blogland), except for results of the keyword analysis. Tomorrow I will check the statistics of our Masters of Media site.
- Live PageRank
Alexa Rank: 2,777,061
Google Backlinks: ~21
Average PR: 1.1 | Max PR: 2 | Min PR: 1
- Visual PageRank
PageRank of individual links between 0 and 3.
- Google Cache
Pages cached two days ago
- Spider View
Looking good
- Alexa
Rank: 2,777,061 (wow, not even below 3 million, that’s not bad, haha)
- Search position checker
[an error occurred while processing this directive]… mmmm.
- Link popularity checker
- Engine: Number of Links
Google: 21
Altavista: 81
MSN: 15
All the Web: 249
Yahoo: 274Major differences there. Would love to know how these differences occur.
- Keyword analysis tool
This analysis is popping out weird keyword results like “403,” “permission,” “d144″. They seem mostly related to database/page access errors. Worth checking out where these results come from.
- Google webmasters site status
GoogleBot accessed my page four days ago. Mental note to self: check out wether it is worth to make a Google sitemap.
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Hi Anne, found my way here as a fellow blogger doing this exercise. If you are going to generate a Google sitemap, may I recommend the excellent Google Sitemaps plugin for Wordpress? I looked at the various methods of doing it by hand, then found this, and it made the whole process much easier.
Thanks for the tip! I am definitely going to check it out. Gotta love plugins :)
Great info but what did you learn and how will your blogging be different based upon this information? Will you change things?
Well I am not striving for major popularity since the things I write about are not amongst the most popular topics (academic research on blog software & photographs of mostly dutch band). The most important thing for me is to be found. That’s why I am pretty puzzled by my keyword results. When I look at my statistics I can see which keywords people use on Google and then end up at my site. I am pretty pleased with these results and I think the tagging improves my findability.
I am still struggling with the categories versus tags (even after reading your nice post), it seems so hard to differentiate sometimes.
So what will I do, what will I change? I think I will have to take a look at my keywords/categories/tags and sort them out. Try to make a consistent system: the related posts plugin for example sometimes pops out fifteen related posts some of which don’t seem relevant to me, but it is the way I tagged them.
And write more often, the more often you write, the more often Google and Technorati love you :)
I have a small question regarding commenting. I always find this confusing, where do you comment? Because Lorelle you commented here on my site and I commented back on my site. But the “conversation” originated here. Is there a general unwritten rule? Because it is hard to keep track of your comments scattered around the blogosphere. Personally I really like the option “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” Subscribe to comments plugin . Just installed it, but it doesn’t solve everything.
Personally, I hate subscribing to comments via email.
You respond to the last question. Where was the question? On your blog, keep the conversation there. If you ask me on my blog, I will answer there.
No bouncing back and forth.
There’s a lot to learn about blogging that is rarely covered in the enthusiasm to “must get a blog”. I do my best to help people get the basics and unspoken rules down in my own blog. Check out How NOT to Comment on Comments and Editing Your Blog Comments to help you get started with a few hints and tips. ;-)
As for tags and categories, think of categories as your “table of contents” and the tags as your “index”. If you don’t have enough content for an index page, don’t add tags. If you do, then add a tagging feature.
Either way, your post will be found by Technorati because WordPress sets categories as tags. You’re covered both ways.