STUDY: What makes a blog really Popular and Cool?

Are you searching for signs which indicate popularity of your blog? Do you want to know how popular your blog is with respect to others? What are the basic important milestones for every blog?

Well here is a list of important milestone every blog author should be aware of for his blog. All the factors which I have mentioned are my own personal learning after 2 years of  blogging which includes writing 400+ juicy posts. you can treat this as a check list to being popular.

So here is the list.
1. Search Engines:
First of all its very essential that you get your blog indexed in Google, Bing, Yahoo and Baidu. If you are already indexed in all 4 a very important milestone has been reached for your blog.

2. Google Page Rank:
A Google Page Rank is a Google Algorithm which decides the importance and relevance of a particular page with respect to keywords. i.e. if a keyword is "tech tips" and your blog appears on the first page it indicates that Google gives your blog more importance in blogs with similar names. Google PR is daily updated but the actual value which we can actually see in toolbar gets updated around 4 times in a year approximately. Google PR is from 0 - 10. 0 being worst and 10 being best.

3. Traffic:
That's very basic. But yes there is a very important thing to consider over here, let me give you an example. 2 blogs with 1000 visits each a per day.

1. Blog 1 gets 80% new visitors each day and 
2. Blog 2 gets 50% new visitors each day.

In that case Blog 2 will be the winner. It is very similar to a hotel in which many people come, new people come by either chance or just for fun, but loyal visitors come by choice as they had previously liked the hotel service. Also its very essential to have loyal visitors as they are the once who will keep coming back. Also a study suggests.

4. Referral Traffic:
What this means is the traffic which you get from search engine is called Organic and the traffic which you get from other blogs is called Referral traffic, this is the traffic which you get based on your blog's or blog posts mention in other blogs in the form of back links. Backlinks are of two types

1. Comments which blog authors add on other sites and 
2. Mentions which are added in blog posts by other blog authors giving a reference to your blog posts or blog for some reason.

The 2nd form of backlinks are considered more precious and good quality. Also if the backlinks come from similar niche of blog that too is considered quality backlink.

5. Alexa Rank:
The Alexa Rank is totally based on Traffic estimates from the Alexa toolbar. Contrary to Google Page Rank Alexa Rank starts with 1 and goes to infinity. In case of Alexa the rank close 1 is considered best. Having a Alexa Rank less than 10000 for your website is very essential. If you have it you are surely popular in the web.

6. Site Links:
This is again Google specific. If you search for your blog in Google and if you see it in 1st page and 1st result and you also see related links to your blog just below it, that indicates your blogs other pages are also getting very popular in Google and Google is willing to show it to the users. You can demote site links and show users the ones you want via Google Webmaster Tools.

7. Social Media Shares: 
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linked In, Stumbled upon, Digg and more. If you find your articles getting shared on these social Media platforms on a regular basis then you can presume that your blog is getting really popular. Social Medial traffic is also considered good quality traffic. In all I have mentioned few very important milestones for your blogs.

I have also observed that blogs from USA and UK become more popular faster due to awareness of all the above factors I mentioned. Now you also know them so start working on the things which you are lagging.