Blog Metrics That Are Easy and Meaningful

  Blogging Tips-  Understanding the metrics of your blog is key to continued blog success (and growth).  It's all about measuring your blog's activity and there are a great many different variables for you to look at.  Let's today review how to find out what the top search engines are capturing about your page info. If you post to your blog regularly (every day is best), then you should be verifying that your new posts are beng indexed promptly. It's simple to check both Google and Yahoo for this.  And, if you find your pages are not being indexed properly, you can take action to correct.  To check how many pages are indexed in Google, do the following;

Go to Google.com - In the search bar enter your site's URL; use the correct URL with or without the WWW. Hit search - The results, at the top right, should say  “Results 1-10 of about 100 from yoursite”. You can also check at the bottom of the screen to see if “repeat the search with the omitted results included” is shown.  This willl tell you how many pages are being indexed by Google. Do the search again, this time adding or removing the WWW, depending how you searched the first time. If you see that your site has the preference set for using the WWW and there are a significant number of pages indexed without the WWW then you may need to investigate and try some some 301 redirects.

Now, repeat the process at Yahoo! to determine how many pages they have indexed. Google will probably show more pages than Yahoo!  It's normal, as Yahoo! is ususally slower at indexing.  It's now advisable to do this regularly (once a week is fine) and verify that they both are indexing your new posts!    The main point to take away from this is the importance adding good, quality content.  As you do, the number of indexed pages will increase. If you know you have far more pages than those showing in the index search, you may need to check on your robots and sitemap files to make sure they're sending the Googlebot in the right directions, and that pages haven’t been blocked.  Of course, the more content your blog has indexed, the more traffic you will likely receive from the search engines, as more searchers (readers) can find listings for your blog posts !!!