CHOOSING HOW TO SEARCH

As you can see, a vast array of blog search engines are out there, and the information I’ve presented so far doesn’t cover all of them. You’ll find blog search offerings from Feedster (www.feedster.com), Bloglines (www.bloglines.com), and even Google (http://blogsearch.google.com ). This space will continue to grow over the coming months, fueling new innovations, better tools, and better tracking and ultimately providing the information you need when you need it.

Most companies use a balance between active searching via services like BlogPulse, Technorati, and IceRocket and more passive searching via services like PubSub, Feedster, and Google’s Blog Search. Using each tool to its fullest potential, and being aware of new tools as they emerge, will help you not only stay on top of who is talking about you, but will ultimately enable you to participate more effectively in the conversation.

WEB STATS, YOUR WAY

The best way to view what’s happening on your website or blog is to view the statistics related to your site. Looking into the past for trends, inflection points, and depressions can be incredibly valuable both in the predictive sense as well as by providing a framework for making decisions. Depending on how your website is configured, you can check the stats for your blog and your overall site in a variety of ways.

Three key types of past activity statistics can provide important information:

• Web stats Such as those about who is accessing your site and what they’re doing

• Position stats Such as where you fit into the rest of the web based on visibility

• Google stats Such as how many people are linking to you Web stats are generally used with some kind of tool that aggregates what visitors to your site have done, where they came from, and various kinds of information about your computer. Like reading the Wall Street Journal or The New York Times to see how your stock is doing, you aren’t really seeing individual trades, or visits you are seeing the overall result of a day’s worth of trading, or visiting. Web stats programs are similar in nature: they display a variety of information, a summary of what has happened that day or month.

If your website is not configured to disclose web stats, you can use external statistics tools such as StatCounter (www.statcounter.com ) or 3DStats (www.3dstats.com ). Both of these require that you modify your site to contain a snippet of code that tracks visitors the same way a regular web stats package would. The only downside is that because of the way the code snippets work, many of these are not as accurate as more traditional web stats programs. Either way, as long as you have the stats, you can begin to analyze them. The important thing with web stats isn’t the numbers themselves as with stocks, the upward or downward trends matter. In addition to general web stats, you can track the value your blog is bringing to your company by using Google stats to track how many people are linking to your site (use the search term link:mysite.com), how many pages Google is of aware of on your site (use the search term site:mysite.com), or even how many other pages are aware that your site exists (use the search term allinurl: mysite.com).

You can also use other services that provide position stats, such as Alexa and MarketLeap, to gauge your visibility in your industry relative to that of your competitors.

ALEXA, MY DARLING

Alexa (www.alexa.com) provides a set of tools designed to help you ascertain the popularity and visibility of your site. On the downside, Alexa stats are based on the traffic behavior of it 50 million users, which, while good, isn’t necessarily accurate. The goal with Alexa stats is to look at upward and downward trends more than specific figures.

One of the key pieces of information Alexa provides is overall rank. Generally speaking, it is more important to know what class of rank your site belongs to than actually monitoring the rank specifically. A site outside the Top 150,000 is considered irrelevant to the Internet at large. A Top 100,000 site is visible and likely popular within a niche.

A Top 50,000 site is visible to the wider Internet, and so on and so forth. The rank isn’t the most important piece of data, though in CNN’s case, a rank of 24 means it is a very, very popular site. On the main Alexa results page, you can also see what similar sites users are visiting, some general stats, and user reviews. The meat of what Alexa provides is located under the See Traffic Details link.

While experts debate the actual usefulness of Alexa’s stats overall, the stats do have a unique way of capturing exactly the type of data you may be looking for. Not only does Alexa plot and graph (up to two years in the past) page views and Alexa rank, it also establishes a “Reach” rank, which represents how many users out of an average million are not only aware of your site, but visiting it.

Alexa also provides information about similar sites, which can be useful for finding sites like yours, as well as information about sites linking in, which provides a list of sites that link to yours. While this information is useful, more effective ways of finding this information, such as IceRocket and BlogPulse, are available.

TAKING THE LEAP

While Alexa is largely a measurement of visibility, it is not the only measure of visibility. Marketleap (www.marketleap.com) provides a series of tools designed to verify your search engine visibility. Because most people arrive at new sites via search engines, most industry experts consider search engine visibility at least as important as overall visibility. Unless you are a search engine expert, the only tool you will likely want to use will be the Link Popularity Check. This tool will rate your site based on the number of links through all search engines to your site.

In addition, you can select an industry so that you can see where your site is positioned within your industry, and you can even compare your site’s results to other specific sites. You enter other sites’ URLs, and Marketleap will provide information about your site’s visibility relative to these sites. Marketleap counts each of the links in a selection of top search engines and then adds those figures together to determine the overall score. This allows you to determine your overall Internet visibility, as determined by search engines. While this figure isn’t as pretty as Alexa’s, it is more accurate in terms of how easily users can and will find you. These figures are interesting to watch as you begin blogging, as blogging makes you several times more visible to search engines than just having a regular website.

WRAPPING IT UP

In this article we looked at how and why you should monitor your overall and blog presence and how to respond to comments effectively. We also looked in depth at a variety of tools and how they can be used. Each of the tools outlined in this article allows you to respond to different issues in different ways, as well as providing context for the success of your blogging endeavors. Knowledge is power, and the information gleaned from these search methods will give you a major advantage over your competition, because you will instantly know what your customers, partners, and the media are saying. In Article 8, we’ll look at how to participate in your blog, including how to start your own. Then, in Article 9, we will look at one of the most important tools in your toolbox: negative comments. Most companies are afraid of negative comments, but the reality is that a negative comment might just save your company, if you respond to it in the right way.