A blog’s success is measured through both its number of active readers or of RSS subscribers and its performance in traffic: number of page views, of unique visitors, popularity, page rank and many others.

There are a few methods to obtain the needed statistics to track and measure such indicators.

1. Access and traffic statistics

Google, the most powerful and popular search engine in the world, provides bloggers with traffic statistics though its free Google Analytics service.

By choosing a free Google Analytics account, you can view stats regarding your blog’s page views, number of unique or returning visitors, keywords used to reach your blog, the most visited pages you have posted, geographical tracking of your visitors and much more.

Google Analytics is currently considered to be a very accurate and relevant tool. Other services you might consider are StatCounter or Woopra with its live tracking and analytics features.
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Those of you interested in website rankings and SEO, you’d better check out your sites’ PageRanks. As we speak, a new update is in progress (one that has been rumored about). Over the past few hours I’ve seen pagerank updates on most of the websites I’m working on, going up, and back dow, and up again. Let’s see how and when it will stabilize.

And also, Alexa.com has just updated not only their design, but most probably their ranking system too.

New Alexa Design and Ranking System

One day ago, Blogsessive was still ranking around 70,000, and now the rank has been updated to 49,130.

Could it be the pressure of Compete and Quantcast breathing down Alexa’s neck? Who know. What’s important is that they seem to be taking steps toward perfecting their ranking system and updating their online image. And that’s good as it was about time to do it.

Anyone who’s blogging with a goal in mind is most probably keeping an eye on the blog’s stats. The competition is strong in this area. We have Google Analytics, Statcounter , Google Trends, Technorati, Alexa, Compete and many more services.

Starting with the premise that – let’s say – the Alexa rank should not count for much in your blogging activity would be a contradictory affirmation. Why? Because:

1. You should not blog with your stats in mind, or you’ll lose the focus on your community;
2. As much as we hate to admit it, advertisers care about these stats.

So, we have to find that perfect way to deliver appealing content to our community, while still trying to improve our stats and attract new advertisers.

If you take a look around at how different advertising services or blog tops calculate the rates and ratings, we’ll see that each and every one takes these stats in consideration. But, what happens when the stats fail to reflect reality?
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