If you are thinking about launching a blog and really pushing it out there to maybe further your career or your business or maybe you just want start a blog as a business you will need to do a bit more than just launch and write. It requires a deal of efforts and blog marketing tactics to get a blog visible. If you approach in the sense that is a business and you treat as a business it will eventually pick up traction in the community and start to gain visibility. One important ingredient you should have incorporated into your blog is some sort of tracking tool so you can see what is going on your blog. We recommend signing up to Google analytics. It is a free tool that allows you to see everything that is going on your site.

Here are some things you will get to see with your Google analytics software:

1. Unique Visitors: You will want to be able to see how many new visitors come to your site. You can also look at reports that allow you to see the trend of new visitors over a period of time to see if your new visitors are trending upwards or downwards.

2. Bounce Rate: You will also want to see how long people stay on your site when they land on it. This will allow you to make necessary tweaks to keep people on your site. If you notice that people leave your site within a few seconds than that is a problem and you can adjust it accordingly. It won’t tell you why they are leaving but just seeing this will allow you to make tweaks and changes to your website.

3. Links: You can also see what links people are using to find your site. This is important because as people link to your blog you will want to know where visitors are coming from.

4. Keywords: You can also see what keywords people type into the search engines to find your blog. This is very important because you can see which keywords are delivering traffic. This will allow you to alter your writing and use specific keywords to target a specific audience.

5. Popular Posts: You can also which posts or pages are the most popular and which get the most visits. This can also tell what kind of audience you have or what people are really interested in hearing about.

Blog metrics is all about measuring and there are a lot of different variable that need measuring. However, if you are writing a post on your blog every day then you need to know whether or not the new posts are being indexed promptly.

It is very easy to check both Google and Yahoo to see how many pages have been indexed at any given moment. If your pages are not being indexed then you will need to investigate why.

To check how many pages are indexed in Google, follow the steps below:

Go to Google.com
In the search bar enter site:yourURL – use the correct URL either with or without the WWW
Click search
In the results screen, you should see towards the top right, “Results 1-10 of about 100 from yoursite”. You should also check the bottom of the screen to see if the words “repeat the search with the omitted results included”.

This will provide you with an indication of how many pages have been indexed by Google. Repeat the search either adding or removing the WWW depending on the first search. If your site has the preference set for using the WWW and there are a significant number of pages indexed without the WWW then you may need to investigate and perhaps incorporate some 301 redirects.

You can repeat the process at Yahoo! using Yahoo.com instead to see how many pages Yahoo! have indexed. Don’t stress too much if the Google shows more pages indexed than Yahoo! This is normal since Yahoo! can be slower at indexing than Google.

What is important is that as you add content, the number of indexed pages should grow. If you know you have far more pages than those showing in the index search, you may need to check on your robots and sitemap files to ensure they sending the Googlebot in the right directions, and that pages haven’t been blocked.

The more content you have indexed, the more traffic you are likely to generate from the search engines.

There are blog metrics tools that do a reasonable job of collecting and displaying all sorts of data related to your blog and your visitors. There are two mistakes that most bloggers, particularly new bloggers, make.

The first mistake that many bloggers make relates to the number of metrics tools they use. You really only need a small number particularly if you use Google Analytics. If you also have a host based tool such as AW Stats then you are halfway there.

The only other blog metrics tools that may come in useful are the ones that check links and keywords. Whilst checking these is important, you don’t need to use two or three different tools. Find a tool that provides accurate information and stick to that.

The second mistake that many blogger make it the amount of time they spend using these blog metrics tools. It’s not just the time either. Because more than one tool is being used, they often wind up with conflicting results so they spend their time trying to work out why.

Using the one blog metrics tool provides a baseline from which further comparisons can be made. That is the only way to measure the progress of your blog. Forget trying to use all the tools. You will confuse yourself, make mistakes, and still not be able to accurately measure the progress of your blog marketing metrics.

There are a lot of ways to measure the progress of a blog, however standard metrics programs don’t always tell the real story for a blog. Having said that, basic blog metrics information is easy to collate and can be a good indication of the success of a blog. These are probably the 8 most important blog metrics for everyday bloggers.

1: How many posts over a given period of time. How many posts per month is a good start. This statistic can be used to compare other statistical information. For example, if you increase or decrease the number of posts, what effect does that have across the other metrics?

2: The average number of comments per post. This can be indication as whether or not you are ‘connecting’ with your reader. This metric can be compared over time to the increase/decrease in traffic. For example, if your traffic increases, does the ratio of comments increase as well.

3: Traffic. There are several traffic measurements that can be useful. How many visitors you receive, how many unique visitors, and over what period. Will you measure per day, week or month?

4: Subscribers. This is not as effective as it once was as many subscribers can be scrappers who are receiving your feed simply to collect any content that be used on their sites. However, increases/decreases in subscription numbers can be useful information.

5: Yahoo Back links. This can be indication as to how popular your content is and whether or not other people are referencing your pages.

6: Technorati authority and ranking. These statistics can be useful for measuring how popular your content is with other bloggers.

7: Search traffic. Knowing how many visitors are arriving via the search engines is a good indication of your SEO activities. You are looking to see a steady increase over a period of time.

8: Page views per visitor. This metric along with your bounce rate can be a good indication of the quality of your content and your site in general. If you have a high bounce rate with a poor page view stat, you may need to rethink your writing and linking campaigns.

This is by no means a definitive look at blog metrics. There are always going to be statistics that are more important on one site compared to others.

If you have a well established blog then you will probably not need to encourage visitors to stop and comment. If, on the other hand, you are a relatively new blogger then gaining readers and comments can be difficult. A relatively new plugin for WordPress call Keyword Luv may help. When it comes to blog plugins, this is one of the easy ones to use.

Keyword Luv allows commenters to include a keyword with their name when leaving a comment. Rather than just leaving a name and email, the visitor can enter name@keword then their email. The comment link will appear with the keyword rather than just their name.

Blog plugins are designed to add to the functionality of a blog – this one does the job well. The use of the plugin brings up another point. When leaving comment on other sites, do you just leave your name?

It would make sense to use a keyword name such as ‘name at keyword’ when leaving a comment so long as the blog owner doesn’t object. Making small changes like this can make a big change when it comes to comments and links back.

Of course, if the nofollow plugin is not used the whole issue of keywords and links becomes moot.