Submitted by: Patrick Schwerdtfeger

My website gets 30,000 visitors per month!

That s what this guy told me once, and he wasn t the first. I was at an afternoon networking event and he was talking more than anyone else. Do you know people like that? Anyway, people are often quick to blurt out how much traffic their websites are supposedly getting.

Turns out, you can find out a lot about someone else s website all on your own. But before we get to that, let me explain a few important distinctions.

First, a hit is not a visitor. A hit is any click on any link on your website. If you have a bunch of links and someone visits your site and starts browsing around, they can easily rack up 20 or 30 hits during one visit.

Most people who claim their website is getting thousands of visitors are misreading their analytics. Those websites might be getting thousands of hits but far fewer visitors. In the case of the guy above, his website was getting about 1,500 visitors per month – not bad, but not great either.

Going a step further, a visitor is not the same as an absolute unique visitor. If you visit your own website twice each day, you could be accounting for 50 or 60 visits (and 1,000+ hits) each month. When reading your analytics, you want to see how many absolute unique visitors you re getting. That s the important number.

Here in the US, you can get a fairly good idea how many visitors a site is getting by checking its Alexa ranking. Alexa is the largest third-party traffic monitoring site on the internet. With a few million people using their browser toolbar, they can estimate the traffic to different websites based on the browsing activity of their users.

http://www.alexa.com/

In Europe and Asia, Alexa is less used so the traffic statistics are less reliable. But here in America, you can get a good idea how popular a given site is by checking on Alexa.

What does that mean? It means that you now have a tool at your disposal every time someone tries to impress you with their traffic statistics.

And why would that matter? Simple. Everyone s looking for affiliates, sponsors, advertisers and partners, and it s good to know which ones have real traffic and which ones are just blowing smoke.

The guy I told you about at the beginning wanted me to give him exclusive rights to sell my educational CDs. When he first proposed the idea, I considered it. But then I got back to my office and checked him out on Alexa what a fraud. My site was getting more traffic than his!

By the way, a higher score on Alexa is not what you want. It s the lower scores that are good. For example, the number one website is the one with the most traffic. As of this writing, Google is #1, Facebook is #2 and YouTube is #3.

Any website with an Alexa rank of 400,000 or less is probably getting at least 100 visitors per day. Sites with a rank of 1,000,000 or higher are getting less than 50 visitors per day and a website with a rank higher than 2,000,000 is getting almost no traffic at all.

Here are a couple other tricks you should be aware of. When you go to Google, you can enter some codes to learn things about any given website.

site:www.WebsiteName.com (note: no spaces)

This displays all the individual pages on the website, allowing you to see exactly how big the website is.

link:www.WebsiteName.com (again, no spaces)

This displays all the online locations linking to the website, allowing you to see the total number of inbound links as well as where those links are coming from.

As mentioned in Chapter 30, you can also learn the Google PageRank of any particular website. The Google toolbar provides it or you could just type google pagerank checker into Google to find tons of places where you can enter a URL and determine its Google PageRank.

Keep in mind that the PageRank score ranges from 0 to ten where ten is the best. It s calculated on a logarithmic scale so a PageRank of four or higher is actually pretty good and the jump from four to five is big. Scores higher than five are increasingly significant as you move up the ladder.

The point is that if a particular website has a Google PageRank of two or three, it s probably not getting a lot of organic traffic from search engines. Once the site has a PageRank of four or higher, it s probably coming up fairly high on organic Google searches and getting some respectable traffic as a result.

Between these four things (the Alexa ranking, the number of pages on the site, the number of inbound links and the Google PageRank score), you can get a pretty good idea about the significance of any particular website, including your own.

These are all little tricks you can use to become savvier as an internet user. Use them to evaluate your own progress and cut through all the hot air on today’s internet!

About the Author: Patrick is the author of “Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed” (2011, Wiley) and a regular speaker for Bloomberg TV. Watch his video about

interpreting Google Analytics data

on YouTube.

Source:

isnare.com

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