It’s been a big few days.

First up, it was my Dad’s 80th birthday & the family got together over the weekend in Sydney to celebrate together. It was a big commute from the Sunshine Coast in Queensland (for a Saturday lunch) but so worth it. Hats off to niece Melissa, who travelled all the way from Perth! There’s something about family events like this, that bring 3 1/2 generations together, that put some perspective back in our daily lives.

Next, it was Anzac Day last Friday. If you’re not from Australia or New Zealand it’s hard to explain the importance of Anzac Day, but it’s one of those ‘come together’ national events that just seem to grow bigger and bigger with each passing year. Even now in 2008, with the last of the WWI diggers gone, it brings a tear to the eye to think about what they (and combatants in the intervening wars) had to go through and live with in the name of the country. I think of Anzac Day as a ‘coming of age’ celebration, the first overseas conflict where Australia participated, not as a British colony, but as a nation in her own right.

Then, we had the first winter swell hit Australia’s east coast. At Avoca Beach on NSW’s Central Coast (where we stayed for my dad’s birthday) it was a solid 12 foot swell with long glassy walls that stretched forever. A pleasure to behold. Water was cold, though.

The finally, when I got home, I saw that Google had restored my PR4 ranking that I so took for granted until a couple of months ago, when it mysteriously disappeared. If you’ve been viewing this blog for a while you would have noticed the many small changes I made, one at a time, to try and isolate what it was that raised Google’s ire. I’ll never know for sure but I believe it was the use of text link ads that upset them.

Meantime, my Alexa ranking has now broken the 500,000 barrier. Many SEO experts belittle Alexa as a valid measure. They may well be right if my target audience was a typical consumer market, one that comprised people who didn’t have the Alexa toolbar installed. But I’d like to think that most people who read this blog are knowledgeable about SEO, and are more likely to have at least one toolbar installed on their browser that includes a feed to Alexa.

The toolbar I use is actually a Firefox plugin SEOQuake, which you can get here for free. SEOQuake provides me with this information for every web page I visit:

• Google TBPR (toolbar pagerank)
• Pages indexed by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live
• Yahoo! link domain tool
• Alexa rank
• Archive.org age
• Del.icio.us index
• Whois lookup
• Page source
• Key term density
• Internal and external link count (from the page)

Useful information that provides a good baseline of data, especially when I’m doing competitive analysis for a client. This is one of a few tools that help me in my SEO work; although it makes life easier nothing replaces hours, thought and hard work.