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Search Engine Optimisation Training Course
Lesson No.10 -
Setting up Your Analytics
by Bruce Gow Search Engine Guy Pty Ltd
http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au
Track your SEO performance.
Now that your website is up and running, we want to make sure that we can
monitor what’s going on, and whether or not our hard work is paying off.
The best way to do that is by setting up a couple of Analytics and Stats
monitoring systems that will enable us to follow up with our progress.
Site Monitoring Systems
This type of monitoring system will analyse how your site fares within the
specific search engine. Important data such as the crawling information,
indexing of the pages, linking status, and other webmaster’s related information
of your site will be provided.
The service is provided free from each of the major
search engines, so there’s no reason not to take advantage of it.
Google Webmaster Tools
1. Go to
Google Webmaster Tools.
2. If you already have a Google account, just enter your account information and
hit the button “Sign in”.
 If
you don’t have a Google account, click "Create an Account Now!" and follow the
wizard.
3. Once you login to your account, add a new website.
4. On the page, you can now see that your status is “NOT VERIFIED”, so in the
drop down box “Choose verification method…”, select “Upload an HTML file”.
5. More instructions will then being displayed for you. Just follow the
instructions and once you are done, click on the button “Verify”.
Congratulations, you have finished setting up your Google Webmaster Tool system.
Make sure to come back later on, and explore more of the tools and reports made
available to you.
Also you can add a sitemap here too. You can do
the same with Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center
Stats Monitoring Systems
The webmaster tools are great for general monitoring of your site, but if you
really want to analyse in detail your traffic stats, you’ll have to go with more
targeted tools.
Awstats
One of the most popular traffic stats reports are from
Awstats. Not only the range of
details provided is incredibly detailed, it is free to setup and use. In fact,
they are usually already setup for you by your hosting company on your account
for free.
Among all my analytical tools, this is probably where I spend the most of my
time on.
Google Analytics
This is another analytical tool provided by Google. The stats provided by
Google Analytics are less detailed, but since they come from Google, people like
to rely on them. It’s a matter of personal choice here again. Google
Analytics can easily be setup on your site, either manually; either using the
plugin Google Analyticator for WordPress (you are using WordPress, right?).
Alexa
Alexa is probably the most popular traffic
volume scoring tool out there and used by many people as reference when it comes
to evaluate the popularity of a site. With Alexa, the lower your score, the
better it is. For example www.google.com is
ranked No.1 and my site is currently 739,735
The score indicates your traffic volume position in
comparison with all the others website on internet. As a very general
indication, a new site may be over 15,000,000 and more popular sites are under
1,000,000.
This is useful for looking at whether you should bother
adding your link to sites with little traffic, or deciding whether to list on a
paid inclusion site. If a paid inclusion site had an Alexa ranking of
under 5,000 like http://botw.org/ you may want to
spend some money on a listing.
This is also why getting a free listing on dmoz.org is
so important, with a ranking of only 725. It's also very hard if you don't
follow their TOS!
Exercise
Before you start any promotion work with and for your site, take the time to
setup all your analytical accounts as you’ll then be able to monitor in detail
how much you have improved.
Also remember that the key to successful optimization is testing, and unless you
have some data to backup your actions, it will be extremely difficult if not
impossible for you to define whether a change you made really had an impact
(positive or negative) on your site.
1. Learn How
to Sort Out the Competition
2. Do
Your Keyword Research Homework
3. Refining
Your Keywords
4.
Evaluating Ranking Difficulty
5.
Mapping Your Site Structure
6.
Understanding Links & PageRank
7. Sculpting Your Site Structure
8. Cascading Style Sheet
Design
9. Using Wordpress
for SEO
10.
Setting up Your Analytics
11.
Engineering the Title Tag
12.
Optimising The Content
13.
Optimising The Description Tag
14.
Building Internal Links
15.
SEO & Images
16.
OnPage Analysis Using IBP
17.
Link Building 101
18.
Beating Your Competition
19.
Building External Links
20.
Using Structured SEO
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