Ranking the success of your website

When talking to a wide group of web owners, it becomes clear that while they are concerned about the quality of their website, they are equally interested in some of the other aspects of your web presence.

Different people have different ways of measuring the success of a website, but there are some that are universally accepted. I have yet to find a site that is not recognized by Google, for example. Google offers a means of searching websites to determine their importance to the Internet community. It does this using a series of complex algorithms and the results are provided on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. I would suggest that an average Google Page Rank is between 4 and 6. Alexa Ranking analyzes the popularity of a website compared to all the others. A score of less than 100,000 is particularly good and one that runs above 10,000,000 is bad.

A general rule of thumb is that, like those sites with a high Google Page Rank, they will also have a high Alexa Rank, although this is sometimes not accurately tracked. Once you have established your own rankings, you can start looking at the competition. We all know who our closest competitors are, those we would like to think of ourselves as better, and perhaps those we would aspire to match. From a web perspective, comparing the Google and Alexa rankings of each of the organizations with those of your own organization gives a good indication of your position in the group.

Using such competitive analysis helps organizations recognize that work is required or that they are ahead of the game and need to maintain momentum. Whatever your line of business, the importance of being found quickly on the web is high. More traffic comes to your site and then you can reflect on what is happening to the traffic when it arrives.

When consulting a website, make sure you don’t forget to consider the simplest aspects. Your rankings are an excellent indicator of your performance.