New Media Bytes | Online journalism, web production and promotion

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Ever wonder how people found your blog or where your commenters come from? If you write a typical news site blog, you likely don’t have access to all the mounds of data that your web staff hoards (oh yes, we hoard it, for s&g (j/k)).

But you probably would love to know who is reading your posts, who is responding to your posts and where they are coming from.

There’s several tools that can help you figure this out:

• Google Analytics (which you likely won’t be allowed to install on your news site blog)
• Technorati (dieing resource, IMHO)
• Yahoo! Site Explorer

The one which likely gives the biggest benefit to the average news blogger: Yahoo! Site Explorer

What Site Explorer does (says Yahoo!):

allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page.

Benefits: You don’t have to register your blog to get the stats. In fact, you can check the inlinks for any site in the world. You can easily see all the pages linking to your site and all the pages your site holds. (Inlink: a link from an external site to a page contained within your base URL)

Because Yahoo! and Google have different ways of judging inlinks, you’ll likely see some differences in inlink results of Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools or Analytics (which both require you to register your blog and upload code to your page). Yahoo! tends to give more results to Google, and I don’t have the answer as to why. I should brush up on that.

How to discover your audience

Visit Site Explorer and type in your URL. Simple as that.

The next page you see will show you results for the pages contained within your searched URL and the number of inlinks.

To find the number of inlinks from sites excluding your own, click the “inlinks” link, and then set the drop-down menu to “Except from this domain.” Now you have a list of external sites that are linking to your content. Great right!

What’s next

Now that you know who’s linking to you, it’s time to get acquainted. Check out the links in your Site Explorer results and visit the pages of others who find your content interesting. You’ll likely meet a new friend or find other resources that you can use in your blog.

Happy friend-making!