Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

Search engines like Google are noting our connections and friendships online, not just our content.  If you want to be found it is worth investing in your online connections.

Tools to measure what you are doing online for your blog, twitter and facebook

Measuring a Blog or Website

Website grader from Hubspot

I would recommend this tool – not only does it grade your site (and others) it gives very practical suggestions on how to  improve it and tells you when Google last crawled the site and how many pages are indexed.  It automatically detects if you have a twitter account and grades that too.

It also ties into Alexa which is another tool for looking at the reach and ranking of any website or blog.  This is on top of your Google analytics which should be one of your primary sources for your own web stats.

Another useful statistic is your Google Page Rank – as a rough indication these are the percentages of sites in each category:

However as The Google Webmaster forum says:

We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics

Grading your twitter account

Here are couple of sites you can use to grade your twitter account, each based on different measurements:

• Klout
• Twitter grader

Grading your facebook page

If you have a facebook page it comes with its own facebook stats and you can also use Facebook grader to grade the facebook of accounts that aren’t your own.

How much is your website worth?

And if you want a bit of fun you can also have a look at how much your website is worth. I have calculated the worth of this website on three different sites: Cubestat, MyWebsiteWorth, Website Outlook. The data is somewhat inaccurate variable but you can see what someone might buy your site for.  Apparently this one is going for…. well, take your pick

Update:

July 29th 2010: My Website Worth have informed me (see comments) that my blog is now worth US$23,677. I’m going up in the market!

The coffee stain on the notebook is a nice touch

Am trying Google Chrome as my preferred browser – so far so fast!  It’s good.

Google is noting our connections and friendships online, not just our content. I am no developer (not even close) but I like the principle here which is that our online connections count.

Google Labs on the Social Graph API :

Build critical mass on your website

With so many websites to join, users must decide where to invest significant time in adding their same connections over and over. For developers, this means it is difficult to build successful web applications that hinge upon a critical mass of users for content and interaction. With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful.

Only public data

The API returns web addresses of public pages and publicly declared connections between them. The API cannot access non-public information, such as private profile pages or websites accessible to a limited group of friends.

Note: what this means is that public friendships or connections are found by search engines, for example, the Utopian College of Emergency for Medicine (UCEM) has a public facebook page which can be found by anyone as Google searches it, whereas my private Facebook cannot be easily found, unless you know me, as it will not be listed by Google.

If you want to be found online, make sure your sites are public

Finally, Google engineer Brad Fitzpatrick comments:

“By supporting open Web standards for describing connections between people, web sites can add to the social infrastructure of the web.”

This is a great definition of the Social Web, or Web 2.0.

Some of you may be aware of the new Google Wave, it’s one of Google’s new initiatives and I call it a ’3D conversation’.  It’s had a mixed reception but I think it will be here to stay.  Currently it’s being tested by around 100,000 users, Sydneysider Frances Jones does a great overview as a newbie non-techie.

For me, as I’m beginning to tentatively play with Google Wave (thanks Vijay for my invite) I think it will amalgamate all those different social media and communication tools (eg facebook, twitter, email) into one place.  It’s a bit awkward, fiddly, I’m missing my friends to play with on there but that’s why Google have released it for testing so that non-techie people can give it a go and let them know what works and what doesn’t.  I’m still at lesson one: how to find people and talk to them.  Lots of explanations out there, but read Frances’ post and here are the Google guys — a big improvement on their over an hour conference presentation when it was first released.