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A podcast for those who design, develop and run websites.

Boagworld is the web design blog of Paul (the Wurzel) Boag who lives in the heart of rural Dorset. He produces a weekly podcast with Marcus (pop star) Lillington on all things relating to building and running websites. They also run web design agency - Headscape.

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How popular is your site?

Posted in Marketing on: Thursday, July 8, 2004 by Paul Boag

Are you interested in knowing how popular your site is compared to your competition? Then here are two automated tools which will help you get a good indication.

www.linkpopularity.com

How many people link to your site and who those people are can dramatically effect your engine position. However it also gives you a good indication of how popular your site is. linkpopulaity.com allows you to search on a web site address and see who links to that address. This allows you to gauge just how popular your site is compared to your .

Alexa web search

An even more powerful tool for judging the popularity of your site is Alexa.com. As with linkpopularity.com Alexa allows you to search on a web site address. However Alexa will return a ranking for your site so you can see exactly how popular it is. For example the most popular web site would rank number one while a new site like boagworld would rank in the millions. The ranking is based on two factors:

  • Your reach – Reach measures the number of . Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com.
  • Your page views – Page views measure the number of pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once.

Alexa also gives you a breakdown of these two factors so you can see how well you are performing on each. Finally it also gives you an indication of whether your ranking is moving upward or downwards. One word of warning however; because page views are based on users that have the Alexa toolbar the results can be some what distorted.

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Additional Information

Produced by Headscape

Boagworld is produced by the web design agency Headscape founded by Marcus, Paul and Chris Scott. Headscape also has a number of other talented guys who blog. Check them out.

  • Craig Rowe is one of our amazing developers and writes some superb posts on everything from .net to AIR apps.

  • Ed Merritt is a Headscape designer who's blog contains examples of his work and a number of free Wordpress themes.

  • Dave McDermid is a Headscape developer who has an excellent blog. He blogs on everything from AJAX to security.

  • Rob Borley is one of our project managers and blogs regularly on client and project management issues.

  • Leigh Howells is our multimedia design guru (whatever one of those is). He blogs on a mixture of design and music.

Paul elsewhere

Paul just can't shut up. He publishes regular audioboos, has a personal blog and is addicted to twitter. He also writes and speaks regularly. Check out the most recent below: