The first is Google’s “PageRank”, which is a number from 1-10 that is displayed in Google’s browser toolbar. My photography site, The Lens Flare, bounces between a 4-5 on the homepage. PageRank is a measure of links across the web that point to a particular webpage (assuming that the person didn’t add “rel=nofollow” to the link, which many sites do). Typically, the more links to a site, the better the PageRank; however, not all links are created equal in this measurement. Links from similar sites are worth more, and links from sites that also have a good PageRank are also worth more. PageRank is updated every 3-6 months or so. To get decent traffic from Google for a specific page, it’s good to have a PageRank of at least 3 on that page unless the keyword is fairly obscure or the website is really optimized for that keyword. To get a PR (PageRank) of 3, a person needs about 5-10 links from similar credible sites. We’ll get into how to get links from similar credible sites at a later time. There are many other factors to how a page shows up in Google’s search results pages so having a good PageRank is only a part of the equation.

The second number is Alexa’s Traffic Details. Alexa is a company owned by Amazon. They have a browser toolbar (for IE) and a browser plugin for Firefox. The toolbar/plugin sends anonymous data to Alexa for each page viewed. They compile all of the pages viewed, and the number of different people viewing those pages, and rank sites using a combination of both numbers. The Lens Flare is currently ranked at about 300k for the 3 month average (1 being the best) out of several million websites tracked. Since they are only counting people with the toolbar or plugin installed, each person can affect the numbers greatly. There are a few million Alexa users, but overall, the sample is a small percentage of the entire Internet population. Alexa’s stats are updated weekly for sites above the 100k mark and daily for sites under the 100k mark.

The ranking is a fun number to watch and see how it improves (or declines) over time.

If you’d like to try it out, you can download the browser plugin at:
http://www.alexa.com/site/download

Personally, I like the plugin on Firefox better than the toolbar on IE because the info is down at the bottom of the window tucked out of the way.