A major factor in achieving good SEO status is tracking your progression. In this post, our favorite SEO guy, Nicolas Prudhon (author of SEO for Web 2.0) goes over some great ways to track your SEO progress and use that information to help you for the best.
Is there something more than checking your search engine ranking position?
When we talk about Search Engine Optimization today, pretty much everybody has a gross idea of what it is all about. When you ask those people how do they evaluate and track the performance of their work, the logical answer is through looking at their Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP).
Actually, beyond looking at your SERP progress, there are 8 vital points for you to study in detail for the well being of your site and real objective optimization of your pages.
1. Traffic Statistics
It’s basic but necessary; it gives you a clear idea of the (supposing) increasing traffic volume of your site as well as some behavioral data about your visitors.
There are 3 elements you are particularly interested in:
- The number of Page views.
- The number of Visits.
- The number of Originating IPs.
By cross-linking those data, you’ll be able to determine:
- How many time an average person visits your site daily.
- When visiting your site, how many pages are viewed on average.
- If you have a peak (up or down) in traffic, is it related a tweak or change you made to your site?
- Is the number of visitors you are getting consistent with the number of commentators and subscribers on your site? If not this means that some changes are required.
2. The Crawlers Activity
What makes sites with high PR or video marketing so powerful? It’s not the sites themselves, often you can produce of find better content elsewhere for the high PR sites, and it’s not about what’s in your video either that makes video marketing so attractive.
It’s the crawling frequency!
It’s so good to be on those sites because they are crawled so frequently! This is why by posting a video; you can get indexed within minutes sometimes!
The more the search engines love you, the more frequently they will crawl your site. You may want to check that this is really happening and how often the bots go to your site:
- An increase of frequency is a good sign; search engines are taking notice that your site produces quality content and is more and keener to check often for what you publish.
- A decrease of frequency is a bad sign; the search engines are losing interest in your site, try to publish fresh content more often and of better quality.
3. Your Top hits URLs
Do I really need to tell you why it is helpful to know which pages are the most popular on your site? Just in case, I’m going to elaborate a bit.
If those pages are really popular, there’s a reason for it, you must have done something right. Analyze those pages and try to find that extra thing that is one those pages that make them so popular.
In addition, if you have something to market that needs a lot of attention, you now know where to advertise it…
4. Your Top Entry Pages
Which are the top 10 entry pages of your site? Like for your top URLs, you must have done something right from a SEO point of view at least!
If you want to advertise a newsletter or ask your visitors to subscribe to your feed, those “welcome” pages are waiting for you.
5. Your Top Exit Pages
Okay, in this case “top” doesn’t sound as good as it should. Nonetheless, you should know which of your pages your readers are leaving your site the most often from!
This time, to tell if there is something wrong with those pages, cross check with your Top Entry Pages:
- If your top exit page volume almost matches the entry volume, something is very wrong with this page from a marketing point of view. Your SEO got the people here, but your content chased them away as fast as they came.
- If your top exit page volume is far lower than the entry volume, you are on the right tracks when it comes to your entry page quality for SEO and content since your readers mostly don’t want to leave but browse for more of what you have to offer!
6. Referrers
I don’t know about you, but I really like to know where my traffic is coming from. Let’s say for example that you do a guest post on somebody else website, this is where you can check how much traffic this brought you. You participate in a forum, or whatever thing you engaged yourself into, you can check whether or not it’s worth the time you spent doing it.
7. The Search Strings
Even more important than your SERP, for what search strings your site is actually found! Isn’t that really important and tells you a lot!
- Discover new search strings you’d never thought of.
- Check if the search strings you are found for match the ones you optimized your site for.
- Adjust your optimization accordingly
8. Localization
Depending of your business, this may or may not be useful for you to know, but if you are in the trade business like e-commerce, you want to know where your visitors come from.
If you are a local business in Australia, and you realize that 95% of your traffic comes from South Africa, you are in trouble…
Alternately, if your business is international but you realize that 50% of your visitors speak English and 50% of your visitors speak French, you may want to consider having your site available in French too to better cater the needs of your visitors and increasing your potential conversion rate.
In Conclusion
As you can see, there’s a lot more you can do than just checking your SERP to see how well or not your Search Engine Optimization is doing.
Being able to analyze your own data properly and you’ll gain a huge advantage over the competition by better understanding your visitors’ behavior and expectation.
I hope this article will be useful to you, should you have any question, don’t hesitate to ask me, I’m here to help!
47 Discussions
To further assist the readers of this blog, can I add some tools to help them do all of the above”
1) Google Analytics: for finding out where your site visitors are coming from or what type of information they are looking for.
2) Quantcast: for finding which age group most of your site visitors belong to, what are their geographic location and from where do they access your site, from home or from office. Even tells you what’s their household income and whether they have completed college studies or not. Pretty useful information, isn’t it?
Chetan’s last blog post..4 Steps To Better Internal Linking in Wordpress
Hi Chetan, thanks for providing the additional info, I didn’t want to cramp the post too much it’s already quite a long read…
Personally I use the stats from Webalizer. Google Analytics is also a great tool; honestly I’m not too familiar with Quantcast so I can’t comment much, but through what you say, it sounds great!
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..Outsmarting the Competition with Long Tail Keywords
Hey Chetan,
How can an online service gather all those “private” data? I mean geographical locations and etc can be tracked through the IP but household income? college studies? – how can they ever work that out, without popping up a survey at the entrance to your website.
Pretty interesting, might check it out ~ I seriously don’t see how they can get this information :O
I’m afraid I have no idea how SEO works, no matter how many times I’m told it just confuses the hell out of me how you ‘work’ a search engine to get your site listed top if keywords.
Dean Saliba’s last blog post..Snapbomb, More Than A Snappy Name
Hi Dean, then you may just be in the best position to do a good job at it!
Nowadays, too many people actually fail at SEO by trying too hard…
If you can make your readers or visitors happy, then you are doing a good job, it’s as simple as that!
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..To “DoFollow” or to “NoFollow” That is the Question…
Well said man, “if you can make your readers happy, then you doing a good job”
SEO isn’t as hard as many people say it to be; just do your on-page optimization (tags, headers, clean code etc.) and that will take care most of the basics.
Try Google-ing “FeedBurner Crashed” or something similar, those were the days when we never did do any SEO, but with the basics + lean code; it’s ranking pretty high
That’s so true Janith,
Just look at Wikipedia, do you think they require you to use a certain density of keywords, bla bla bla…
That doesn’t prevent them to be PR9 and on top of almost of your searches…
I just want to fight the misconception that SEO is all about that tweaky programming stuff that nobodies understand so that you have to pay for it.
Anybody can do SEO, doing good SEO is not difficult but do is time consuming, hiring a SEO expert to do the job for you is to save you time, not really because they can do things you can’t do yourself with proper instruction.
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..To “DoFollow” or to “NoFollow” That is the Question…
Great post. I personally use almost all of these tools for my blog. Like you said in one of the comments above, trying to hard can actually make your SEO worse. Google is trying to find pages with good content. That’s why they have all these guidelines: to make sure the content is related to the search term, and that it is good.( why links are important. If you have great content, you should be fine for the most part.
teenwebguru’s last blog post..10 Ways to Improve Writing
Yeah, Google tend to sniff out good content and send traffic to it, but with a little bit of optimization from your side; you can push yourself even up higher!
Like I said before, the basic on-page SEO + lean code and a few in-links can get a page ranking pretty high
Like the term suggests, it’s not about making everything happened by itself alone, it’s about OPTIMIZATION, making what you already have even better, that’s all.
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..To “DoFollow” or to “NoFollow” That is the Question…
Interesting post. When I was new in this business I got very busy. Busy tracking my SEO. EVERY DAY several times a day. Looking at the above you can see how quickly it leaves no room for much else
What’s my point?
Tracking your performance is important, how else are you going to know whether you are on the right track or not? But it is so easy to get over-involved in reviewing and re-reviewing your stats rather than build a business. A very common newbie mistake
Niche’s last blog post..How To Add Your Blog Feed To Your Facebook Profile
True that, when I first started – I realized that I was checking my traffic/Adsense logs almost every 5 minutes. It was pretty pointless, given that the logs weren’t even lively updated; but it was just that “over-involvement” like you’ve mentioned, Niche.
It’s important to keep things in track, but don’t over do it
As they say; everything’s good in moderation.
You are right, it’s time consuming but it’s necessary to do.
Now, it’s not necessary to do – everyday – not only it would suck up all your time like you said, but you can’t gather enough data on one day to make it any valuable.
Personally I do spend a bit of time on it once a week (like every monday morning where I do share a small report of it with my readers), doing it any more frequently is pointless in my view.
For people who don’t have that much time, at least once a month should become an habit of yours.
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..To “DoFollow” or to “NoFollow” That is the Question…
First off all, awesome guest post Nicholas! Really glad to have you as one of our contributors, because your perspective on these SEO “things” are just priceless!
I totally forgot about Crawler Activity and how important they were! This reminded me of the feature that Google introduced into the Webmaster’s Tool’s a few months ago; where you can set the crawler frequency – depending on how often you post new content.
Also comparing your Top Entry/Exit pages can say a lot too! I forgot to do this too, but will definitely look into it now
Janith, one reason I really like to write for you guys is that you are such a great community, I really like your spirit!
I am dedicated and my blog to be different in a common niche as SEO.
I don’t want to be just “another SEO guy”, I want to be a different one, one that truly shares what he knows, one that is here to help others. I don’t just spill out doctrine I read in someones book or that a so called “guru” talked about. I think, analyzed and put the theories to the test, if they are valid, I acknowledge them, if not I discard them. For a long time, people where convinced that the earth was flat…
So I definitely welcome all questions and comments. If I know the answer I’ll give it you, if I don’t (and I’m aware that I don’t have all the answers) I’ll do my best to find the answer or I’ll ask somebody who does have it.
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..To “DoFollow” or to “NoFollow” That is the Question…
Nice work nicholas! I stumbled across this page through twitter and happy that i did!
Lot of nice information, but can you please tell us more how we can use “crawler rate” to track our SEO performance.
Where can I even find these logs/statistics?
I dont even know who crawls what on my site
Hi BlogstaR!
Nice dropping by, the guys at Blogussion really rock!
Ok, regarding your question, without being too technical, it can be summed up like this:
The more the search engines like your site, the more often they crawl it. Videos sites are so popular that the search engines crawl them continuously, this is why if you submit a video you can rank within minutes.
For a site or page to be indexed, it must be crawled first (note that because you are crawled doesn’t guarantee you to be indexed). If Googlebot (for example) crawl rate to your site is once a month, and that it just happened to crawl your site yesterday, you’ll have to wait an entire month before it crawls the page you published today…
The more Googlebot loves your site, the more often it will comes, that would change from 1 month to 1 week, to every 4 days, less and less, every 1 days, few times a day, etc…
For example Googlebot comes to my site about 40 times per day. This is why when I make a new post, it gets indexed within the hour usually.
Like I said before, I use the stats from Webalizer (free script very detailed). Actually you have a stat program installed on almost all the web hosting package nowadays, you may want to check with yours.
In hostname of your visitors look for names like “crawl-66-249-67-138.googlebot.com” or “llf520173.crawl.yahoo.net” for Yahoo! for example. Anything that looks like that tends to be a crawler.
I hope this answer your question.
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..To “DoFollow” or to “NoFollow” That is the Question…
My top exit pages are articles that are irrelevant to my niche! Also, I didn’t know about the crawl frequency since I thought that was completely random.
Kai Lo’s last blog post..Does Length of Article Matter to Search Engine?
That’s good news and bad news Kai Lo!
* Good news your top exit pages are articles that are irrelevant to your niche!
* Bad news, what the hell articles that are irrelevant to your niche doing on your site?
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..To “DoFollow” or to “NoFollow” That is the Question…
I rant on some of my old articles. I’m on point now and learned from my mistakes. Readers who are looking for ways to increase traffic don’t want to read about me ranting.
Kai Lo’s last blog post..Does Length of Article Matter to Search Engine?
Great Article – May I suggest a tool that’s great for providing a snapshop of many of the things you recommend ? DNFrame is a new tool I started using last week. And thanks for the heads up on the other tools, I’ve added some to the domain and quality sections of Vtoolbox.
OK lets shake it up a bit with some disagreement.
Is the number of visitors you are getting consistent with the number of commentators and subscribers on your site? If not this means that some changes are required.
I have no idea what that means…..
1. Commenters will always be lower. It’s a pretty well known fact that the larger percentage of readers, for whatever reason, will not comment
2. Subscribers – I’m not sure what you mean by “consistent” here either. if your visitor count isn’t considerably higher, none of your promotional efforts are doing very well.
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..Blog Readers or Twitter Followers – What’s YOUR Preferance?
Hi Dennis, thank you for making this discussion more interesting!
Let me try to elaborate a bit more on this:
1. Of course, commenters will always be lower; the question is how low can it reasonably be. If you get 10,000 visitors up to your post and barely any comment, something is not right. Like you said, for whatever reason some people will not comment, but the odds are still that website that generates traffic is in right to expect a minimum amount of response from its readers. It’s then the work of the Author to minimize the reason why people are not commenting. It is likely that the content no matter how good, is not engaging the visitor to comment for some x reason.
2. A subscriber by definition is a visitor who liked your content and believes that your future content will be worth reading and being aware of it, this is why they subscribe. Having a lot of visitors but few subscribers tend to indicate that you are doing a good promotional or SEO work, but not as good when it comes to the conversion once you brought your visitors to your site. If you consider that you bring in 5,000 new visitors daily but only 1 of them decides to subscribe, I still believe that it is a signal that something must be done to increase that conversion rate.
Of course I never meant that having 10,000 visitors should results in 10,000 commenters and 10,000 subscribers… though we wish all!
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..Week #9 Summary
Tracking the Stats helps us to take steps to improve in certain aspects which we are weak in. Anyway great post !
Harish’s last blog post..Why You Should Promote Your Contest? And How ?
Hi Harish, thank you for your feedback.
You are correct the point is to found out some of our weaknesses and try to improve them, SEO is about making what is good better, but also to make acceptable what was poor.
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..Week #9 Summary
Good stuff Nicolas, though I am not sure I will put crawler activity as high as #2, not many people will be happy to shall out big bucks for increase in crawler activity unless it converts to more traffic
- Abhi
blog@MWolk’s last blog post..Adwords Campaigns of Indian Political Parties like BJP and Congress
Ha ha! Hi Abhi,
The list is just a list, I didn’t intent to put more priority on a point or another, sorry if I mislead anyone with that.
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..Week #9 Summary
How do you think one can increase the crawling rate . I mean I did a test .I put few of our pages on Digg and other bookmarking websites daily .those digg pages get crawled but not my website .Don’t it sounds strange ? and what do you mean by video marketing .I mean youtube have no-follow link and its the most popular .so it can get you some visitors But I don’t think the link from you tube would attract a search engine
Waiting for reply
Thanks
Gagan
Hi, I will try to answer your questions the best I can.
Quite simply, the crawling rate is directly related to your website trust and authority levels. (I think I’m going to write a post about that today). Put even simpler, the more the search engines love your site the more often they will crawl it. It’s the same for human, the more we like a blog, the more we visit it! Just try to think like a search engine, and you’ll get your answers.
The fact that your site doesn’t get crawled through social bookmarking and others isn’t strange, as you mentioned the nofollow attribute there. The traffic from those sources comes from word-to-mouth spread among social communities, not just search engines results.
Regarding YouTube, the traffic you get is not from the link, it’s from the exposure of your video. Imagine Alex Fraiser make a video on “how to tweak Thesis”, probably minutes after uploading the video, this one will show in the search results with a good ranking (supported by the trust/authority level of YouTube). Now what do you think will be the reaction of the people when they watch his video and learn that his site is blogussion.com?
Like for some search results, I have multiple ranking, even if it’s from different video sites, article directories or people who reprinted my articles along with my original article. It doesn’t take long for people, even if they don’t know me, if they see that I cover 7-8 of the top first page of result, that somehow I know know my stuff!
I hope this clarifies things for you, if not I’ll try again!
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..Week #9 Summary
Ok , But I have some doubts with your statements :-
1 . I was talking about bookmarking websites which give us a do-follow link like digg .I was saying that even the digg pages containg my links are getting crawled by google but my website is not getting crawled at the same time .
2. when you are saying about video in youtube .Then Even if youtube video come in to SERPS and can increase traffic to my website .But it can’t increase my crawl rate because the link is no-follow .So google wont crawl them
Do you think that there is a relationship between crawl rate and traffic to a website ? or it simply depends on the number of links ?
Thanks
Gagan
1. I couldn’t say 100% for sure but it seems to me that the pages we submit are on the 3rd or 4th level. Crawlers usually don’t go deeper than 3 levels unless specifically instructed to do so. (Where the purpose of building sites with a 3 tier structure)
2. That’s right, this method will increase your exposure and potentially your traffic and branding, but has nothing to do with the SERP for your main domain, no faster crawling rate.
The main factor that will affect your crawling rate is your domain trust rank and authority level for the search engines. You can read more on this article (http://www.nicolasprudhon.com/seo-help/seo-help-on-domain-trust-rank-and-authority)
If it’s still not clear, let me know and I’ll try to re-explain again
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..Trackbacks – The Link Exchange of WEB 2.0
Cool post, Nicholas. I love it when you do posts on Blogussion… SEO is one of my weaker points so it makes a nice change every now and again
Simon | Teenius’s last blog post..Finding Ideas For The Next Article
Thank you Simon,
I’m glad I can be of some help!
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..Week #9 Summary
Very Cool Post Nicolas. I’m trying to learn SEO and its strategies bit by bit. This helps me alot !
A question, If I’m not getting you wrong, Search Engine loves video posts or Video posts are crawled more frequently then rest?
Enk.’s last blog post..Using Wordpress as a Website
Hi Enk.
I’m glad this helps you.
Regarding your question, search engines love to crawl video directories sites like YouTuve, Vimeo, etc… Now, having videos on your post may also please your readers
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..Trackbacks – The Link Exchange of WEB 2.0
Good writing, thanks for info.
You’re welcome!
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..Trackbacks – The Link Exchange of WEB 2.0
Hey,
In our office we use Google docs to keep track our SEO performance.I believe you can do little more like put keywords in seperate and then track their performance indifferent column,That will keep you busy in tweaking your performance for earch keyword.
I am relatively new to SEO, and this information is definately helpful. Thank you!
Glad to hear that this post helped you Greg!
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask me, I’m here to help!
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..Can We Survive the “NoFollow” Black hole?
You Wrote: Is the number of visitors you are getting consistent with the number of commentators and subscribers on your site? If not this means that some changes are required.
—-
So what are some suggestions to remedy this situation ?
Nokia Mobile Talk’s last blog post..15 Twitter clients for your Nokia smartphone
Obviously this would imply either one of two things or both:
1) Your content is of poor quality and people are not interested of coming back or being updated about it. This one is quite easy to solve, just make a better site and write better content that people like and want to read more of it.
2) Your content doesn’t engage people to comment, this can happened even with very good content. Make sure to try to relate to your readers or at the very least engaging them in the end by asking them a simple question enticing a response from their part.
Nicolas Prudhon’s last blog post..Write the Content People Deserve and Get the Traffic You Deserve
Very well written post however, I would recommend that you turn the No Follow off in your comment section.
Keep up the good work.
A fantastic read….very literate and informative. Many thanks….what theme is this you are using and also, where is your RSS button ?
Great post and I’m bookmarking it. Really I mean it and this is not spam comment
I think most of your tips can be check through Google Analytics. I’ll give it a try and check those stats you mention and see if I can make some improvement to our my blog.
MichaelR´s last blog ..All About the V Thing
thanks for blog ..is very nice site
thank you, nice posting.
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