This article is contributed by Eliza Morgan.
If you’ve been in the blogging or SEO business for a while, PageRank is likely your preferred metric that you use to test the quality of your sites. Of course, PageRank has been the standard for several years now, and it’s definitely important to do all you can to keep your PageRank number high. At the same time, however, a site that’s ranked high using PageRank can be a very poorly executed site, while a stellar site can still have a low PageRank. Here are a few other metrics you should look at to see how you can improve your site to its full potential:
1. Click through rate
If you don’t already have Google Analytics, or some other analytics tool that can give you more numbers than just PageRank, stop reading this article and sign up for it now. One metric that I think is very important is Click Through Rate (CTR). A low CTR shows you that you need to work on making your entire site more compelling. A high CTR shows that users who come to your site are doing what you want them to do – clicking through several pages on your site or blog and not just viewing your home page before leaving.
2. Bounce rate
Bounce rate is another metric available on Google Analytics and similar tools that gives you an insight into how your users navigate your site. A high bounce rate means that your readers arrive at your site and leave only a few seconds later. A low bounce rate means that users are actually sticking around and checking out all that your site has to offer.
3. Social media influence
Social media is king right now, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Even if you have a high PageRank, this doesn’t mean that people are actively engaging with and sharing your content. There’s no one tool to measure your social media influence on various important networks like Facebook and Twitter, but this list by Pam Dyer should get you started.
- Klout
- TwentyFeet
- PeerIndex
- Empire Avenue
- Sprout Social
- Crowdbooster
- Twylah
- My Web Career
- Appinions
4. Number of comments.
Even if you do have a number of visitors to your site, to achieve an optimum experience, you don’t want them to be passive visitors. You want them to truly engage with your content. And you can tell if they are truly engaged only when they leave substantial and informative comments. If no one is commenting on your blog, see how you can modify your material to make it more interactive. End blog posts with questions like this:
What do you think about PageRank? What are some other metrics we should look at to optimize our sites?
Author Bio: This article is contributed by Eliza Morgan who is a full time blogger. She specializes in writing about business credit cards. You can reach her at: elizamorgan856 at gmail dot com.
