Happy Fourth of July!

I’m rolling out an exciting new series on Ars Grafik today. We’re calling it our Weekly Blog Stats Review. Here’s the scoop:

When we started Ars Grafik two and a half months ago, our goal was to create a place where bloggers, both new and experienced, could come to learn about blogging, blog tools, and blog design. We have tried very hard to uphold that vision over the months, and Ars Grafik has been extremely well received.

Kendall and I run a web design firm called Shea Media, which takes up most of our time. Ars Grafik was created as a fun side project that we could work on during free hours. Because this blog was intended only as a creative outlet, we never set goals for growth or readership, and we’ve not placed much emphasis on marketing or networking with other blogs. As such, the growth in search traffic and readership that we’ve experienced has been almost entirely organic without any marketing effort.

Beginning this week, we are going to place a greater emphasis on getting our name out to the blogging community. We will be looking for ways to increase our page traffic, twitter following, RSS subscribers and search engine visibility. We are inviting our readers to follow along as we initiate new marketing campaigns and watch the effects the campaigns have on our blog stats. While most bloggers are very wary about publishing their actual stats, we are going to let it all hang out.

The idea behind the Weekly Blog Stats Review, is to offer, with full transparency, a wide array of important blog statistics. These stats will depict the current condition of Ars Grafik. We will post this information each weekend in a Weekly Blog Stats Review post, in addition we will post these same stats in a new sidebar feature that’s been added along with today’s post.

In the Weekly Blog Stats Review, I will discuss our current stats, changes we’ve experienced, and goals that we’ve set for the blog. When campaigns are particularly successful, I will break them down into step by step tutorials. As this series matures, I plan to provide many techniques for blog growth and exposure. You won’t need to take my word for the success of these techniques because the stats will speak for themselves.

Current Blog Statistics

In this Weekly Blog Stats Review, and in each following review, the seven day stats will represent the past week, from Friday to Friday. The single day snapshot will represent stats as of the most recent Friday. Let’s take a look at our current blog statistics.

Blog Stats as of 07.03.09

PageRank

Our current PageRank situation is odd to say the least. As of July 3, 2009, our frontpage is registering a PR3.

This is a perfectly respectable PageRank, especially after only two and a half months of active blogging.

Things become confusing when you visit some of our earliest posts. A good example is the introductory post for the Slate theme, the very first post on Ars Grafik published on April 19, 2009. This post is registering a PR4.

The mystery deepens when I visit our Google Webmaster Account and am informed that the front page has the highest PR on Ars Grafik.

My explanation is this: we kicked off our blog by releasing a free WordPress theme, which we listed on the WordPress theme directory. Immediately, we began registering fairly high numbers of incoming links from other blogs that were linking back to us by reference or through the credits link in the footer. It is my guess that Google took a glance at this incoming link trajectory, thought it looked an awful lot like link spam, and responded by suppressing the PageRank of our front page.

It is my hope that as we continue to produce quality content and offer something of value to the web, Google will see that we are not spamming and will remove us from the penalty box. Stay tuned for more on this saga!

Technorati Rank

Currently, Ars Grafik has a Technorati rank of 641,581. This is one of the many statistics which reflects that we have not emphasized networking and marketing. In the future, we will be looking for ways to cross market with other blogs that deal with similar subject matter.

Alexa

Alexa rank is a reflection of a site’s traffic patterns, and traffic through Ars Grafik is on the rise. As our traffic stats improve, our Alexa rank will follow. Presently, Ars Grafik has an Alexa rank of 163,273.

Incoming Links

I will be using two sources for information about incoming links to Ars Grafik.

First, I will source our Google Incoming Links information from our Google Webmaster Tools account, which places our incoming links for the entire site at 13,747.

Second, I will use our Yahoo Site Explorer account, which registers 11,713 incoming links to the entire site, excluding internal linking. These statistics are somewhat misleading, as they include multiple pages from a single domain that contains links.

This is one area in which we have made an effort to grow stats. Incoming links are at the heart of the Google PageRank system, and our goal has been to try to accumulate as many links as possible through legitimate means. We decided that producing quality WordPress themes and offering insightful support for those themes would be a good start. So far, we are very happy with the results. Incoming links will continue to be a priority as we develop marketing campaigns.

RSS & Twitter

RSS subscriptions are one area we have failed to emphasize. In fact, I am not sure we have ever even mentioned our RSS feed in a published post. This will be an area we will work on in the future. Right now, we have 30 RSS subscribers. Not nearly enough.

On twitter, Shea Media has 320 followers. Again, there’s room to grow.

Weekly Stats: 06.29 – 07.03

Page Views

Last week, Ars Grafik received 3,806 page views. In comparison to established blogs, this is not many page views at all, but for us, this is another milestone in our page view growth. This graph from Google Analytics helps to illustrate the rate at which we are experiencing growth:

You can see that our rate of growth has trended strongly in a positive direction, with the notable exception of two weeks ago when we were in the midst of a moving into a new home and our posting rate diminished. The current week’s number are on track to continue the upwards trend, although low page views today (since it’s a holiday) may impact the final numbers.

Visits

Last week, Ars Grafik experienced 2,414 visits. Visits differ from page views in that one visitor may view many posts or pages. When a visitor enters your site, it’s considered one visit—regardless of the number of pages he or she views. Here is a graph from the WordPress Stats plugin showing our growth in visits:

This chart clearly shows the positive trend in visits to Ars Grafik.

Page Views Per Visit

The number of pages viewed per visit is really a derivative of the last two statistics, but it does provide an important insight into a blog’s performance. I look at the number of pages viewed per visit as indicative of the retention power of a blog. If the blog is very interesting to readers, they will visit multiple pages. If it’s only mildly interesting, these same readers will leave after only one page view. This is very similar to bounce stats, but much easier to grasp. Last week, Ars Grafik averaged 1.58 page views per visit.

Average Time on Site

Knowing the average time that viewers spend on your blog is important in much the same way as knowing the number of pages viewed per visit. It indicates the interest readers have in your content. Last week visitors to Ars Grafik stayed an average of 1 min. 08 sec.

In Closing

In the initial Weekly Blog Stats Review, I’ve tried to explain in some detail the current stats for Ars Grafik. Remember that even if you miss the next Weekly Blog Stats Review, all of our stats will be available in the new sidebar feature.

In future reviews, I intend to spend more time on growth strategy and goals, so stay tuned.