Blogger Versus Wordpress, Alexa, Google PR

Blogging is huge right now. People blog for different reasons. You can actually get quite serious about blogging and make a profession out of it- depending on what you are blogging about. For instance, there are people in New York who follow fashion and make a living blogging about it.
A lot of people ask me what is better Wordpress or Blogger.
It all really depends on your needs but, for the average person, Blogger is the way to go. Think of it as free webspace.

Wordpress can give you a more 'professional' look and will give you easy to use and install apps. But, in order to take advertisements on your site, you need to self-host the Wordpress software. If you don't want to take advertisements the you can use a free Wordpress hosting site (they'll throw in the ads).

A big trend now is to use a Wordpress theme that has been converted to Blogger (like mine). You can easily customize it as I have. Wordpress is pretty complex with PHP etc whereas, Blogger is straight xml. I've used both platforms and would choose Blogger anytime. A self hosted Wordpress is a good option for a site that will get a lot of hits such as one that is associated with a major news outlet.

Other things to consider.
If you are interested in taking in advertising you should be concerned with traffic, Google Page Rank and Alexa. This is what advertisers will look at.

There are several ways to measure traffic- I use the Google analytic way usually. This tells me who is visiting my site, how they got there etc. Getting the traffic to your site takes some work that I will not get in to right now.

Google Page PageRank is a link analysis algorithm. It is used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. This means, the better your rank the higher up on the Google Search you'll end up. The rank is measured from 0-10. A start-up blog will have a 0 while a popular blog my achieve a 4 or a 5 or even higher.


Alexa is actually a subsidiary of Amazon.com. It is a measure of ranking that is used to determine popularity. What it measures is the number of web hits your site gets from anyone using the the toolbar. Yes, there is controversy about the accuracy of this method but, advertisers do look at it and they believe it is accurate.
Here is what the widget looks like

This is a really high rank that is nothing to be proud of. It shows that I don't get a lot of hits on this site. However, my personal site gets a lot of hits and my Alexa hovers in the 50,000 range- which is really good for a blog. (My Google Page Rank is 4. ) Who is number 1? Yep, Google.