Free Web Analytics for Small Business




Working at Home





Andrew Lock

How’s your website doing? You’re not sure? Well, if you head on over to URLTrends.com – a free, Web analytics tool — you can easily find out more about your website.


Enter any website at URLTrends.com – I entered the New York Times website — and it will give you a variety of different reports dealing with visitors, search engine optimization, and links to and from that website.


For example, while I was researching the NYTimes.com on URLTrends, the quick summary reported that it’s been online since January 18th 1994, its Google page rank is as 9 out of 10, and the Alexa traffic rank is 92.


Now you can get even more information about the various reports. Under site rankings, for example, it shows the Google page rank of whatever page you’re researching as a graph — it represents your link site in orange and the URL average below it in green. Wow, NYTimes.com shows some huge drops in the Google page ranking back in May, but otherwise it’s up around 9 out of 10.


The Alexa traffic history also shows a bit of a decline here maybe because we’re coming into the summer months and not as many people care about news sites during the summer. But it’s gradually building up to about 4.3 million visitors.







URLTrends.com; small business Web tool, Web analytics
URLTrends.com
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Let’s take a look at another report; this one’s all about link popularity. Sticking with the New York Times, we’ll check out the Google link popularity history.  


It shows that it’s been rather flat until last September and then it really took off — not quite sure why that happened.


And when you look under the Yahoo link popularity, you’ll see that shows it dropped off during that same time frame. Currently, there are about 14 million links in Yahoo.


You can also get a report on the search engine saturation, which is basically the number of pages in your domain that a search engine has indexed. When you know which pages the search engines see — and which ones they don’t — you can take corrective steps to make those pages visible to the search engines. The NYT website shows about 40 million pages — don’t we all wish we could make that claim for our own sites? The highest number of links 55 million, average links about 7 million.


In terms of Yahoo, the number of pages for site saturation is around 36 million. These are the outgoing links from the NYT according to URLtrends.com. Outgoing links kind of peaked in May, hand have been declining. It gives you a list of 322 outgoing links, some of them going to other NYT websites – in fact the vast majority of them are going to NYT related websites.


You know, I’m not smart enough to be able to interpret all of this data, but maybe you can — or know someone who can. If you’d like to check out how your website is doing in the world at large, go take a look at URLTrends.com.

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You’ll find lots more small business marketing tips and resources from Andrew Lock in our Small Business In-Depth series, Lock in Your Marketing Resources.

Andrew Lock is a self-described maverick marketer and the creator and host of Help! My Business Sucks, a free, weekly Web TV show full of practical small business marketing tips, advice and resources to help small businesses “get more done and have more fun.”





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