A few months ago I moved this website from a static design (HTML and Dreamweaver) to a Wordpress-driven blog. Like so many sites shooting for position in the hyper-competitive SEO space, my static site was sitting with only a few views a day, and served only as a reference point for clients and prospects who wanted to “check me out”.
I just checked my Alexa stats, and my rank has now cracked the magic 1,000,000 mark (it’s at 838,216, down from 1,187,256 a week ago). Here’s the figures:
- Reach - up 2,100% in 3 months
- Traffic rank - up 3,453,147 in 3 months
- Page views - down 65% in 3 months
The page views per visit is a bit worrying, but I think it’s because a blog audience is very different from a static site audience.
My major traffic source is Stumbleupon, which is very exciting. My biggest traffic day was 4 Jan (560 visitors) following my Search Operators: The Definitive List post, however the most popular post, by just a small margin, is my Is Your robots.txt File Killing Your Search Engine Rankings? post.
I believe there’s plenty of proof here that a blog format can and does generate traffic to websites, and personally I’m really glad I finally made the switch.
Please leave your comments on your own experiences!
8 responses so far ↓
1 JoLynn Braley // Jan 24, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Hi Mark, congratulations! You’ve got a great attitude and you’re making excellent progress, keep it up!
2 Raymond Chua // Jan 24, 2008 at 6:09 pm
It’s very rewarding to watch your alexa ranking climbing up.
I’m trying to get mine from 6 figure to 5 figure (>100,000) and it’s getting closer each day.
3 Birney Summers // Jan 25, 2008 at 8:09 am
I like Alexa because it does change from week to week. Page Rank and Technorati authority rank take too long to see a change. I like watching graphs to see what is happening so I make my own. I understand them better if I do the graphing rather than the pre-packaged stats packages.
4 Mark // Jan 25, 2008 at 12:09 pm
@JoLynn, @Raymond: Thanks you for your positive comments! It’s a good feeling to see progress
@Birney: A lot of commentators diss Alexa, apparently because it’s not a true representation of all traffic (it only counts traffic from people with the Alexa toolbar installed). I don’t care. Alexa is still pretty pervasive in the web community, and it doesn’t matter if you’re 700,000 or 1,200,000. As long as the trend is in the right direction!
5 Robert @ reason4smile // Jan 26, 2008 at 2:44 am
Congratz for the achievement Mark!
Wish you the best for your blog!
6 Karen (Karooch from Scraps of Mind) // Jan 26, 2008 at 8:46 am
I don’t really understand the whole Alexa thing Mark. But I have to admit I like watching my ranking in the little tool bar icon improving each week.
7 GG // Jan 27, 2008 at 2:11 am
Good news–and congrats. Frankly, I don’t place much value in Alexa. I am more interested in my Google analytics reports and click throughs…which eventually I believe will lead to conversions.
I do understand the excitement–just changing my blog from Blogger to Word Press shot up the ranking and reader interactions. I find that my blog gets first page ranking (and often 1st place position) on topics I’ve been covering.
So, did you find the same sort of thing happening for you?
8 Mark // Jan 29, 2008 at 10:09 am
@Robert: Thank you for your encouragement!
@Karen: It’s fun, isn’t it? I checked this morning (after our Australia day long weekend) and it’s climbed a little higher, up to 805,716. Every bit helps
@GG: For me, Alexa is a trend indicator rather than an absolute number. I understand where you’re coming from, but all the same if my Alexa climbs, week by week, I think that’s a good thing. But I don’t think I’ll lose too much sleep if it stays steady, or even drops a bit.
Unfortunately for me, SEO is a topic that’s almost as widely written about as Internet Marketing. So no, I don’t often get first page ranking. My recent Pagerank plunge (from PR4 to PR0) doesn’t help, either (I think it’s because I use TextLinkAds in the sidebar).
Most of my traffic comes from StumbleUpon. My theory is to write good original content, & that seems to get me Stumbled enough to see good levels of traffic, albeit traffic is still quite lumpy and totally dependent on my posting frequency.
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