Checking the performance of your blog

Posted on October 7, 2009 by David Hopkins

Search Engine (Google)
Firstly, I always check with Google to see if it can, and has, indexed the site. Type “site:yoursite.com” into the search box (replace the yoursite.com with your own address, obviously) and see what comes back.

This at least shows you if it’s been indexed, and how many pages. Google has so far indexed 685 pages from this blog alone (posts, categories, polls, tags, etc).

Another useful Google tool is “refer:sitename.com” – this checks other websites that link to you.

Social Bookmark (Delicious)
I’ve often wondered, as I bookmark someone else’s blog or blog post, does anyone bookmark me? There is an easy way to find out – Delicious.com/url

You type in the address of your blog, or blog post and then see a good results page based on who’s bookmarked you (username, date, tag assigned, etc). There’s also a nifty little ‘chart’ view where you can see how often people have bookmarked you.

So, why would you want to see these things:

to see what people liked most of all in your post
to analyse why one post was successful while another one was not
to see how people describe/tag your post
to explore your competitor’s social media success, and learn from it
to perform advanced keyword research (how people tend to tag shows how they are most likely to search).

These are just two methods, using just two websites.If you have any tips and tricks to find out how successful your blog is please share by leaving a comment below.

2 thoughts on “Checking the performance of your blog”

I have found that using link:http://yoururl.com is a good way to find who is linking to your site. And this works other search engines too, not just Google.

Using Refer: is new to me, but I will give that a try too.

Thanks