Using Searchstatus to Monitor Your Blog or Website

As a content provider for websites, you choose your keywords carefully keeping in mind words that are popular; and you provide links on these keywords, since the earnings from the website depends on the quality and quantity of the links the article provides for a keyword or search phrase. The algorithms Google search engines employ assign a numerical score called page rank to each Web page by counting and valuing each link and they would position your articles higher, depending on its rankings. The rankings take into account backlinks, which are incoming links to a website or web page, and they indicate who is paying attention to that page. If the backlink is from a site with higher page rank, then the receiving page is blessed with a higher page rank.

PageRank scores are on a logarithmic scale.

If you want to earn money through your blogs or website, SearchStatus should really be on your list of must-have tools for Firefox for assessing the performance of your website/blog. This supertool sits unobtrusively on Firefox and lets you check your Google PageRank, Alexa Ranking, and Compete Rankings, SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank, backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Whereas Google PageRank is an approximate ranking for a single page, Compete and Alexa rankings are for the entire site. The problem with Google Pagerank displayed on the web page is that it gets updated very infrequently, and doesn’t always reflect current status. The presence of other rankings help us to get a more balanced view of our site or blog.

Alexa Rank is a measure of web site popularity. An Alexa rank of 0 means that the site is not ranked. Each visit to a site counts as one visit; multiple visits to the same site during a day only count as a single visit. The Alexa Rank is calculated daily and updates occur every 3 days or so. The Compete Rank is based on Unique Visitors in a given month.

Installation and setting up of SearchStatus:

You need to be running a Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox browser to install this. You can download Searchstatus from SearchStatus homepage. If you get a blocked message at the top of your screen, approve the site for install. A popup asks you if you want to install the SearchStatus software. Click Install. You’ll have to restart Firefox to complete the installation process and then you’re ready to set it up.

After installation, click Tools->Add-ons option on your Firefox browser. You will see the SearchStatus installed as an extension.

Click Preferences to set the location where you want the menu to appear. In the following screenshot, I have chosen Nav-bar as a location:

As a result, the Searchstatus menu appears on the navigation bar as shown below:

If you right click (or ctrl-click for the mac) the menu item (q with a circle), you will see the sub-menu options, as shown below:

If you highlight the enable option, you’ll see a menu of three things. Pagerank, Alexa, and Compete. The Google pagerank is just for show and won’t affect your pagerank in any way, but Alexa and Compete pass the site/blog details to the respective sites and their presence on your (and your readers’) browser improves the ranking they compute. So, if you get your friends and readers to use this plugin, you can see that with more recorded traffic for site/blog, the rankings grow.

One of the other things that you’ll want to check out is the Highlight Nofollow option. A site with a “No follow” is alerting search engines NOT to follow that link while crawling the website unlike the Do Follow links that can be crawled by search engines. Though you should prefer Do Follow sites/forums for commenting, leaving comments on blogs that use the no-follow links in the comments area is not a total waste, as people may still click the links and reach your blog/site.

Highlight keyword and Show Keyword Density are very useful options to understand why your blog is not performing as well as it should.

As an example, I used the Highlight Keyword Option, specifying ‘brown rice’ as the keyword for my article on the benefits of brown rice.

Did you notice that the algorithm counts the keyword that appears in the comments also? May be you can ask your friends not to simply say ‘wonderful article’, ‘good tips’ or ‘thanks for sharing’ but use the keyword or the main topic in their comments.

When I used the Show Keyword Density, this is what I got:

This shows how important it is to use keywords in the Title, Headings and anchor text for links. You may use Bold/Italics for highlighting the keywords the first time it appears.

Another great SearchStatus option is Meta tags. When you write articles for Triond, the title becomes the Title meta tag, description becomes The Description meta tag, and the tags you specify become the Keyword meta tag. Look at the screenshot for my article on Outloud Outbrain article.

There are other important features to Searchstatus as well. You can see backward links – the inbound links from other sites. If you have bookmarked/shared them in various social networks, they should appear using this option.

A tool is as useful as you make it. This tool is versatile, and you can put it to imaginative uses. More on this later.