Website SEO: Baseline performance snapshot, step 5
Although this step is not critical to increasing your search rankings, it’s very important to measuring your results down the road. You will have to know what works and what does not. The goal of this step is to create a starting point for measuring your SEO results.
First, let’s make sure you’ve got a website analytics installed. My first recommendation is Google Analytics. It’s free, simple to install (if you have access to edit pages on your site), very flexible and offers tones of insight into your website user behaviors. If you don’t have access to edit your pages, ask your webmaster. There are also companies like Squarespace that offer its own website statistics packages, so feel free to use those.
Second, you will want to create starting measurements of the following things. Of course, a new site will have all values = 0. But hey, 0 is a good starting point.
- Website visitors (the simplest thing to track through any analytics package of your choice)
- Number of pages on your website (check you sitemap.xml file)
- Number of pages indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo! (search: site:www.domain.com)
- Number of links pointing to your pages / domain: there’s a few options here:
- Google: links:www.domain.com
- Check SEOmoz’s: Open Site Explorer tool
- Yahoo! Site Explorer. Here are the steps: 1) explore your URL, 2) select inlinks button, 3) choose shot inlinks “except for this domain”.
- Run your site though something like Website Grader, which is a free tool to check your overall website health. As a result of the check you will get an overall score (based on multiple dimensions). Just rerun the tool again in a month to see how you do.
- Check to see your current search ranking for selected key phrases using tools like WebCEO and Raven Tool. Both tools have free trials / versions, so make sure you both check current status and recheck in a month. Choose one tool for long term work. Going back and forth between tools takes time and gets on your nerves.
Last but not the least, it’s important to have goals. Having a baseline snapshot and a monthly goal draws pretty much a straight line to success. If you don’t reach the goal by the end of the month, it’s ok. Any information is good information, because it makes you think about improvement. Tweak critical things and keep at it month after month.
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