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Charting Your Website's Progress
One Way of Noting the Progess of Your Website
This way of charting your website's progress is based on what I currently do with
my own. There are very many ways of charting the progress of one's website. Some
prefer to monitor the progress of their website's progress entirely online; others
may rely on other methods such as manually writing them down on such traditional
record-keeping ways as index cards. The method which I will share with you employs
both of the above methods. It is simple and need not involve too many highly
technologically-advanced software being used in charting the progress of one's
website.
There are four elements which I want to mention that you can use in charting the
progress of your website. These are: traffic count, traffic rank, PageRank and
search engine positioning. I will speak about them here in more detail.
Charting the progress of your traffic count
Those who host your website usually have incorporated in their services a way for
you to keep track of the traffic count of all your webpages. To actually track
the progress of these webpages in terms of traffic count, what can be done is to
pick the top twelve of your webpages that receives the most traffic. Charting them
in index cards will be very helpful if you especially also add the dates when you
took note of them. You can make the charting of this progress every three days
or more, depending on your own homelife tasks and working schedules. As you make
the charting of the traffic count span for about two months, you will notice that
the progress of each webpage differs in rates at various times. There will be
instances when the progress of one webpage overtakes the other webpage that used
to enjoy much progress and traffic. The results of these data can help you make
important decisions not only your webpages but for your website as a whole. That
is why charting the progress of your traffic count is also very important. If you
analyze them together with the other factors, you can make decisions that will
greatly improve the progress of your website.
Charting the progress of your traffic rank
For this part of charting your website's progress, you can use the assistance of
a traffic rank register such as in the Alexa toolbar. Downloading the Alexa toolbar
is easy. Just go to the site, www.alexa.com and follow the user-friendly instruc-
tions. Once the Alexa toolbar is installed in your Internet Explorer browser, then
all you need to do is to check at the toolbar the traffic rank of your webpage.
Usually, the traffic rank given by Alexa is the traffic rank for your entire domain.
Thus charting the progress of your webpage is really charting the progress of your
entire website.
As you learn more and more about traffic count and traffic rank, you will realize that
as you add more and more good content when you publish many webpages, when-
ever these webpages reach a certain number and the traffic in them increases,
your traffic rank in Alexa will greatly increase. It is highly motivating to see
that after so much hard work creating webpages with good content, you get a
traffic rank higher than what you expect.
So, charting your progress as regards traffic is easy with Alexa. You can also try
to see how your webpage or website fares in the other raters of traffic rank. As
of now, what I use is the one of Alexa. In charting the progress of your traffic
rank, you need not depend on just one evaluator. You can also check through the
Internet itself what other means which you could use to evaluate and chart the
progress of your traffic rank.
Charting the progress of your PageRank
One important indicator of a webpage's progress is also its PageRank. Google has
its own criteria and evaluation procedures for giving a webpage a certain PageRank.
One thing though is highly vital in getting a high PageRank: this is obtained by
incoming links from webpages that have higher PageRanks than your webpage. So
the key in charting the progress of your webpage's PageRank is to note which of
your incoming or inbound links are of good quality PageRank. If not, then you may
want to add more incoming and inbound links that have higher PageRanks. However,
we must also remember that charting the progress of your PageRanks is also very
important because PageRanks rise and drop overnight! When a inbound link to your
webpage used to have a PageRank of PR5, something may happen in his own inbound
links that will lead to the drop of his PageRank to PR4. When his PR drops, yours
will also drop eventually. Although it is not a right way to make an analogy, the
value of a PageRank is like a stock. They rise and drop overnight like the stocks
in the stock market do. So, I guess in this regard, to really make the best of
of charting the progress of your PageRank, it is best to be linked with those
webpages and websites that are solidly based and well-grounded in the ethical
procedures of the Internet. Otherwise, if you link with those who have high PRs
but have used unethical procedures in obtaining them, then it is likely that their
PageRank will drop, get a zero count, and eventually be banned for a long time in
the search engines.
Charting the progress of your search engine results positioning
Charting the progress of your search engine results positioning can also be recorded
in your index cards - together with your traffic count, traffic rank, and PageRank.
You will notice that the results in relation to this also fluctuate fast. And they
change not only on a daily basis but even more frequently than that. But for our
purposes, charting the progress of your search engine results positioning can be
as regular as every three or more days. What is important in the charting of these
results is to pick the leading search engines. This is because some of the other
search engines already base their results from these leading search engines. So, in
charting the progress of your positioning in the engines, pick three to five of the
leading search engines and compare the results between them. You will discover that
in some search engines your webpages dominate the top ten but in others, it may be as
low as the tenth results page. Also, it depends on the niche keyword or keyphrase you
use to search your webpages.
There are other ways I am sure of charting the progress of your website. Those other
factors you can also integrate in your record-keeping. But of all the elements that
give a certain evaluation as to the quality of a webpage or a website, the above four
elements will be a simple guide for anyone who owns a website or who manages one.
Dennis-Emmanuel Cabrera
January 2, 2005
Catholic Internet Mission:
Proclaiming the Gospel Online
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