How to research your web presence

It is difficult to measure your success. You can look at your traffic logs and track the number of unique visitors and page views but this only gives you an insular look at your progress. There are other ways of tracking your progress for your blog

I have been blogging at http://www.blogtonomy.com/ for exactly a month now so I thought it was time to take a look to see if I have made a dent in the internet. My first port of call is http://www.marketleap.com/ where you can measure your link popularity, your search engine saturation and check to see if you are listed for your keywords in the search engines. After checking my site I can see that I have some back links from MSN and Yahoo, alas no joy at Google.

Next stop is http://www.urltrends.com/ where you can get a nice report detailing your presence on the internet. It tells me that I have a Google PR of zero, only to be expected with a site so new. It also informs me that I have Alexa rank of over two million which basically means my site isn't being visited that much by users with the installed Alexa toolbar. Not to worry these things take time. There are a number of other metrics in the report mainly covering link popularity in the search engines.

Last stop is http://www.technorati.com/ where you can find out who is linking to you. All you need to do is type in the URL of your site into the search box to search for results that include your URL. This is useful to see who is talking about you or linking to you. After checking my site I see that most of the links are from where I have submitted information to Digg, a third party site.

Of course there are many other sites you can use to investigate your presence on the internet but these sites will give you a good idea of how you are going. Along with your stats you can get a good idea of how your promotion efforts are working or not as the case may be.