There are a number of ways to check your website’s progress. Some of the most commonly used are Google Page Rank (PR, Technorati, and Alexa. It’s important not to get obsessed by these ranking criteria, but some people like to chart progress of their blogs popularity :)

To quote from wikipedia, google PR; “PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set”.

Technorati tracks incoming links to your blog, or as they call it “blog reactions”. It is a way of  charting the popularity of your site. If someone links to your site, mostly by way of linking to a post you made, it Should show up in your technorati account (which you need to first set up) as a “blog reactions”. Every reaction counts as 1 authority, and the more authority you get, the higher your technorati ranking becomes. But many are complaining that, recently, technorati reactions are not showing up, indeed, this site has many links to it which are not showing on technorati. If any bloggers have any advice on this, I’d be happy to hear from you.

Alexa traffic rank you can obtain by visiting www.alexa.com, and enter your site for evaluation. The Alexa bots will then crawl your site, and you get the option of installing the Alexa toolbar, which gives information on traffic rank of every site you visit. The aim here is to generate as many links to your site as you can, also increase traffic, in order to get your Alexa ranking lower, preferably into the top 100,000 sites. 

Here is a link for improving your Alexa ranking.