I recently became an administrator at Fellowship of Christian Bloggers (FOCB), although I don’t really know what that means except I get to visit other incredible Christian blogs. I’m working my way through the extensive 373 member list and keeping tabs with them through my reader.

David Brown has assumed web leadership of the group and, along with Jan Christiansen (who originated the group), Leslie Jenkins (who designed the new format), Lori Ettel, Mark Luker, Idella Luster, Carolyn Roth, Rachel Stephenson, Valarie Wyatt and myself (administrators) have created an easy to follow site crammed with quality Christians writers, each with distinctive God-given abilities and talents. Visit us at http://www.focbonline.com/focb/.

In addition to blog listings (Our Members, Member Director), the site includes Google Page Rank, Global Alexa Rank, and the number of pages indexed by Google and David is hoping to add some other metrics soon. He explains, “Blogging to encourage others and [to] glorify God is way more important than just the numbers, but these do help us understand how well were doing to get our posts out there so others can see and read them. Numbers aren’t the most important thing, but they do matter.”

The numbers are updated daily and each site is ranked. The top 50 blogs on the FOCB are awarded a special Top 50 Blog badge.

But the rest of the metrics are Greek to me. I know they are important, but more so for commercialization. There is a whole SEO (search engine optimization) science and a host of optimizers ready, willing and able to assist with manipulating your blog through well placed words and tags for more readership. And in the world of commercialism, more readership means more advertising potential.

At this point in my life, that’s not a high priority but it is fun looking at my “numbers”. I’m not quite sure what they mean, but it does give a frame of reference.

PageRank is an algorithm used by the Google web search engine to rank websites in their search engine results. According to Google, PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites. It is not the only algorithm used by Google to order search engine results, but it is the first algorithm used by the company, and it is the most well-known. Google uses an automated web spider called Googlebot to actually count links and gather other information on web pages.

My Google PageRank is 2 on a scale of 1-10. Well, two is on the low side, but it’s better than 1.

There are lots of way a blogger or a webmaster determines the success of his/her blog. Alexa is among them. Basically it’s a web analytical company and it gives rank to websites/blogs according to their daily visitors and page views. Run by E-commerce giant Amazon.com, it focuses on its web analytical capabilities and today is the leading web analytical company.

What rank is considered decent in Alexa’s ranking?

The lower the better, if you’re rank is under 100,000 in Alexa’s ranking then its considered more than good. The rank, again, is an important factor in legalizing the advertising space on your blog or website.

I’m told, every blogger likes a good Alexa ranking since the better your Alexa rank is, the more traffic it will generate. An Alexa rank can range from one to a billion based off the number of websites there are.

I’m a far cry from those numbers at 9,954,015.

The last metric totally confuses me. Pages indexed by Google I think means how many pages you have to go through to find my blog. When you search  “wisdom from a father” at Google, I suspect it would take about 1,240 pages to find me. However, on Yahoo or Bing, it showed up on page 1.

Bottom line … I’ll stick with Bing.

THOUGHT TO REMEMBER: A smile is a window on your face that shows your heart is at home.