One thing that I learned from all the blogs that I have created in the past is that there is no greater joy for a blogger than seeing his blog grow with every passing day. Rising through ranks, gaining readership, receiving backlinks, getting more spam comments, all of these can make any blogger sing to the tune of “Sinabawang Gulay” without getting embarassed.

A growing blog is equal to a happy blogger.

I remember the time when my blog’s visits shot up for a week because of my article “Paano kung naimbento ang blogging noong 1989?” For seven straight days, I was constantly checking out my blog stats, grinning at every figure added to my site’s counter. I even dreamt about it every night! Swear!

It’s a good thing that there are a lot of tools for a blogger’s disposal in order for them to monitor a blog’s growth. I have tried out some of them and have been on top of Pinoy Blogero.com’s everyday progress.

Site Counters
Back when journals and personal websites were a hit, site counters were the only means of monitoring a web page’s progress. It takes a log of every visitor who views a certain page and saves the data for viewing. A very simple tool yet very handy.


Other site counters offer more than just page hits, some have features like unique pageviews, returning visitors, and visitor origins. The site counter I use here in Pinoy Blogero is StatCounter.

Technorati
If you want to check out how many links are pointing to your blog, one tool that you can use is Technorati. The “Blogs that link here” directs you to a page which shows the visitors the actual links from other sites that are linking to yours. You can now know what other people are talking about when they link to your blog.

Site Rankings
Many people submit their blogs to site ranks for them to be able to determine how they will fare against others. Through here, you can compare your standings with other blogs and assess your differences.



Although different site ranks have different algorithms in ranking sites, they still tell you the same thing, “If you are on top of the ranks, it means you’re doing good”.

There are lots of site ranks here in the Philippines, some of the more prominent ones would be Ratified.org, Sikat ang Websaytko, and Ranking.PinoyBlogosphere.

Xinu
I have stumbled accross this nifty site called Xinu which gathers stats from a particular site and displays it for easy viewing. All you have to do is to state the URL and Xinu would do the rest.

It displays a blog’s Syndication stats, Google PageRank, Backlinks, Indexed Pages, and a lot more. With Xinu, you don’t need to go jumping on different accounts just to check out your blog stats.

Blog Juice Calculator
Ever head of Blog Juice? The Blog Juice Calculator tries to squeeze out your blog’s juice by looking at four major factors that affects your blog’s growth, your Technorati sank, Alexa sank, Bloglines subscriptions, and number of links.

One nice feature about this tool is that you could show and brag about your blog juice to others with a badge just like the one below. Yes, my blog only has a blog juice of 2.9.



Google Analytics
When it comes to useful and helpful tools, you could trust Google to be on top of the pile. Google Analytics is a free web tool for webmasters/blogger that helps users in monitoring your blogs stats through different factors and categories.

Google analytics shows how many visitors are visiting your site, how long they stayed, and what page of your blog they look at. They even tell you how many visitors came from search engines and what keywords they used to get to your site. You could even check what visitors are clicking on your site through the “site overlay” feature.

Hope these tools could help you. If you have other tools that you use in monitoring your blog’s growth, please feel free to share it here.

Happy Blogging!

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