“Traffic” is the most common metric to evaluate for websites and blogs, but there are many other ways to measure a website’s performance. This list is not intended to be exhaustive, but is applicable to the largest quantity of sites. (For example, “sales,” “gross profit” and “net profit” are not included here, but are vital for ecommerce sites).
♦ Traffic Rank is a stat via Alexa.com that represents a relative ranking compared to other sites on the Internet. It’s not a perfect number, but it’s readily available. It’s also a stat that many advertising-funded sites are interested in. In this case, a lower number is better, since that represents higher relative importance on the Internet.
♦ PageRank is Google’s rough assessment of SEO power, on a 1-10 scale (higher is better).
♦ Indexed Pages are a measure of the volume of content visible to search engines. This is one of the numbers where more is better since the more pages, photos, and videos that are available, the more reasons search engines have for bringing traffic to your website.
♦ Inbound Links is a measure of SEO reputation and relevance for your industry and/or keywords. In other words, the more incoming links that are visible to search engines, the more your site is being referenced by others as noteworthy.
♦ Email Subscriptions are vital for ecommerce sites, but also reflect a non-commercial website’s outreach. More subscriptions are better, and in terms of evaluating a website’s resale value, this number can be quite important, since the ability to market to a large database of subscribers is very valuable.
♦ Comments are specifically pertinent to blogs and indicate the level of engagement from readers. Higher is better, especially since only a small number of visitors will leave comments.
How is your website performing?
