Excellent blog.

Google Analytics is indeed an excellent tool provided by the Big G.

Another terrific free service is Statcounter. It’s especially good for lower volume sites. http://www.statcounter.com

I’d like to offer one tip to your readers that hope to increase their blog’s page rank without paying for SEO:

Post, post, post.

The deeper your blog, the more Google and Yahoo like it. Yes, you can optimize and back link and Meta tag and all that, but the real sex magnet for the Big G is frequent updating with original content.

When I started my blog, my ‘first name, last name’ was ranked on the fifth page of Google. Now, it’s #1 for my name search. Also, my last name alone has finally hit the first page.

This means nothing to me really, in terms of direct financial benefit. I don’t monetize my personal site, so it matters not if ten people or ten thousand visit.

However, when someone hears about one of my media properties in the off-line media, they can find them linked on my blog. So there’s some inherent (passive) marketing benefit with a high page rank.

HTH-

SM

PS: Am I the fourth reader?