How Chiropractors can Assess PageRank, Authority, and Website Traffic

Over the weekend, I had a comment come through for an older post that basically suggested that if you listed your site with Alexa and used their toolbar, traffic to your website would increase. Although a nice thought, it just isn’t true.

Building an online presence takes time. But time isn’t the only ingredient. There are many other factors like using the right software juxtaposed with search engine optimized copy just to name a few.

Then, when this symphony of ingredients mixes correctly and is allowed to age like a fine bottle of Bordeaux, many amazing things can and will occur. For starters, all that hard work will eventually pay off when your increased traffic transforms into loyal customers.

However, no matter how well your site performs, always be cognizant of its need for improvement. In other words, it doesn’t take long to lose your place in line if you don’t pay attention to details.

So, to help you keep track of the details, let’s take a look at three tools chiropractors can use to assess website traffic, authority, and PageRank. And, to illustrate my point, I’ll throw in images related to this blog, Next Generation Chiropractor.

1. Alexa

Alexa.com allows one to review traffic metrics, search analytics, demographics, and more for all types of websites.

For example, here are several screen shots from a recent analysis of Next Generation Chiropractor:

Enter your site’s web address:

Click on “Get Details”:

Review both World and Country Traffic Rank:

According to Alexa at the time I ran this analysis, my site ranked 508,681 out of all websites in the world. Understand, however, that this number will fluctuate. Matter of fact, just last week it ranked 496,319.

2. WebsiteGrader

WebsiteGrader.com is an exceptional free tool created by HubSpot, an Inbound Marketing company based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. As its name implies, WebsiteGrader allows one to grade sites to see how well they’re performing in terms of traffic, SEO, social media, et cetera.

For example, here are several screen shots from a recent analysis of Next Generation Chiropractor:

Enter your site’s web address:

Check your site’s grade:

Review Section 1:

Review Section 2:

Review Section 3:

Review Section 4:

Review Section 5:

Pay attention to traffic rank listed in Section 5. Next Generation Chiropractor demonstrates that it sits among the top 1.64% of all websites in the world. This didn’t happen by chance but came through hard work, discipline, and focus.

3. PRChecker

PRChecker.info lists the PageRank of any website. Based off of a scale from 0 to 10, PageRank determines the relative importance of a site in relation to others.

Here’s how Google describes PageRank:

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

In other words, a PageRank results from a “ballot” among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it (“incoming links”).

A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page. PR measures number of sites which link to particular page and value of 0 means that the page is not linked.

For example, here’s a screenshot of Next Generation Chiropractor’s PageRank:

Obviously, my goal is to increase PageRank over time. However, landing a 4 out of 10 is no small feat. Especially when you consider that Next Generation Chiropractor just launched in April of 2009.

So, in summary, it takes more than just listing a site and/or installing a simple toolbar to increase traffic, build authority, and grow PageRank. Both time and effort are required to reap the rewards of a highly visible site.

Question: What steps have you taken to improve PageRank? How about site traffic? Are you building authority within your niche?

Let us hear your thoughts in the {comments} section below.