For a long time there wasn’t any very effective ways of measuring your “brand” or blog’s reach aside from the more traditional “link:” queries which you’d use on search engines.
With the explosion of bloggers out there more and more services have been built by bloggers for bloggers. Some of these include ways of finding out just how big of a blogger you are by measuring how other bloggers react to you.
As such, even the search engines have gotten into other ways of measuring your blog’s reach. In this article I review a few of those tools and show how they can be used to measure your blog brand.
Before I get into the blog specific tools I thought I’d review some which you may not have thought of.
Google Webmaster Central, for example, has a nice easy way to check your reach by reviewing the inbound links pointing to your site. By creating and submitting a sitemap to Google you not only get crawl stats, index stats and keyword stats but you also get more detailed inbound link stats than a normal “link:” query would show.
In addition to showing more links, Webmaster Central also shows you who links to which pages and on what terms. Granted with the current system you can’t see links and terms together on a page, however if you install the Greasemonkey Extension in your Firefox browser, followed by the GWT External Links script you can not only see how many pages links to specific pages on your site but also the PageRank of those domains.
While Webmaster Tools is handy for finding sites that have linked to you, it doesn’t always show you the freshest links. But Google also has another service to help you do that.
Google Blog Search is, as the name implies, a blog search engine. With it, you can search for a term or URL just like with the regular Google search. One nice thing about blog search, however, is that it gives you the option to sort by date. This way you can see who has most recently linked to your blog or posts, according to Google.
Of course there are blogger specific systems out there as well to help you determine your status on the web. Technorati actually has a few tools to help with this.
With Technorati, you can install widgets on your site to help show others how much of an authority you are. Their “Authority” widget shows how important your blog is. They also have a link count widget which, as the name suggests, shows how many other blogs link to yours.
Both of these widgets help to show others how important your blog is.
Another way to measure your online profile is through MyBlogLog. They too have widgets which you can add to your site such as the “recent readers” widget which shows your most recent site visitors who also have a MyBlogLog account. MyBlogLog also has a “what readers clicked” widget which can help to expose more content to casual visitors, thereby potentially increasing your online profile.
In addition, joining communities in MyBlogLog can also help you expand your profile as other members of those communities may read your blog and promote it either through posts of their own or bookmarking it for others to see.
If these types of tools don’t interest you, perhaps my last one will.
It is a fairly new service which measures your online profile. In fact that’s about all it does.
://URLFAN is a service which aggregates tens of thousands of blog feeds and then sorts through them looking for blog mentions. In a way it reminds of of Alexa or Compete but without the shortcoming such services can have.
Simply enter the URL of your blog and it will search out and display all blogs which mention your own. It will tell you how many blogs were found mentioning yours as well as rank your blog in relation to others it tracks.
So as you can see, there are many ways to measure your online profile. Whether it’s just looking at Google Backlinks or getting the latest in mentions from Technorati or ://URLFAN you are sure to find out just how popular you are.
Now I guess the next question is: How to you make your blog more popular online?
