Today I noticed that FreshBlogger has finally broken through the 100,000 barrier on Alexa. I’ve been paying close attention to the Alexa Rank of this blog for several months now and I’ve watched it creep up in the ranks. It’s taken a while, but I feel like this might be an important milestone.

I first started looking at Alexa Rank when Yaro at Entrepreneur’s Journey posted on the effect the Alexa Rank Widget was having on his blog. His theory was that having the widget there was causing an increase in his ranking. Others believed that the widget has no effect whatsoever on Alexa Rank and have evidence from Alexa to prove it.

I suppose the increase I’ve noticed has come from a growth in traffic as well as my own use of the SearchStatus plugin for FireFox which displays both Alexa Rank and Google PageRank. SearchStatus also has some other cool features for checking out SEO and link related statistics for websites. I’ve found it useful for getting a snapshot of how popular a site really is without having to do a bunch of research.

I’m trying not to be a crazed stats watcher, but it’s hard not to take notice of this stuff when blogging is the topic I’m often blogging about. If you want to set goals for your blog, it’s important that these goals be measurable so that you can gauge your progress. This milestone is one of the goals that I’ve set to achieve for this blog and I’m happy to have made it this far.