How Tools Measure Your Internet Life

Out of 1,229,954 global brand websites analyzed in areas including number of incoming links, mobile device support, location tags, accessibility standards, daily mentions on Twitter, developer plugins used, and dozens of other variables, ariherzog.com has a Heardable rank of 195 and a brand health score of 698 (out of 1,000 possible points).

Look at a Heardable report extract.

Thanks to your participation in the comments, your choosing to link here from blogs and social networking channels, and web standard compliance in numerous areas, this site is ranked in the top 1% of those 1.2 million sites.

Not too shabby, considering the majority of the top 100 include Northwest Airlines, CBS News, Skype, The Wall Street Journal, and other for-profit industry leaders and media conglomerates.

Heardable analyzes your data and presents a single perspective of how your own site stacks up against benchmarks and other sites.

Heardable is not alone.

There are many tools that analyze your internet life, some focusing on brands and companies and others specific for individuals. Some are comprehensive and others are specific to this platform or that. Over 300 tools analyze Twitter and Facebook activity, for instance.

Measuring your internet life stretches beyond tags and standards. What if you want to know how often and where your brand or name or a keyword is mentioned online? Social Mention is the odd duck that caters to all.

Whether you want to know the mentionability of something as ubiquitous as Harley Davidson and Coca-Cola or as simple as your name or your personal website, whatever you type into the search field, you will see results that link to references across the social mediasphere.

Give it a whirl.

When you’re done tracking your name and keywords, hone in on your website and grade it. Where does your site rank in contrast to 3.7 million other sites graded on Website Grader?

Does your site include a blog? Do your images include alt tags for search engine spiders to correctly index? What is the readability of your content? Answer these questions and get a grade.

Are you influential?

If you have a Twitter or Facebook account, Klout and PeerIndex are two clones that provide a glimpse into your influence.

From the topics you regularly tweet about, to the frequency of your messages shared by other people, to the external websites that you share the most, these scores present an index whereby you can relate yourself to other people to gauge how influential you are online.

Some suggest these scores are meaningless. Others indicate why brands give free gifts to those with high scores. Make up your own mind.

Tools include their own perks.

If you want to run metrics that you can download to Microsoft Excel, use RowFeeder. If you want to aggregate common business metrics into one dashboard, use Metricly. If you want something else, a tool exists for it.

Some tools are free to use. Others cost money. Some can be run in seconds. Others require login credentials.

Find the tool that works best for you. Do you have one?

Thank you for reading! If you are inspired to add a comment with your thoughts, please visit How Tools Measure Your Internet Life in your browser.
Ari Herzog provides communications services to the nonprofit and public sectors, and encourages you to join his Facebook community.