I installed a little toolbar on my browser called Alexa. One of the nifty things it does is rank the website you’re currently viewing against all the other sites on the net that it knows about. For example, AOL.com is 14, CNNFn is 634, Motley Fool is 1,033, Blogger is 8,014, Utne Reader is 42,372, MN Public Radio is 144,426, Mental Game is 1,216,931, The Contented Cow (a local pub) is 4,009,868, and my wife’s soon-to-be-retired website is 10,313,114.
Real Joe is 1,449,517.
The other thing that it measures is the number of links into a site. So by my linking to the sites listed above, that adds one to their total, whenever their spider gets around to cataloging my blog. For example, AOL.com has 13,406,126 links in, CNNFn has 804,436, Motley Fool has 248,074, Blogger has 979, Utne Reader has 6,001, MN Public Radio has 5,687, and Mental Game has 91.
Currently, I don’t have ANY links to my site. I’d like to get my ranking under a million by April 1 and to do that, I’ll need to get other sites to link to me.I’ll have to brainstorm on which ones to approach first, as well as put up a page on my own site to reciprocate for those who ask for it.