EggRage.co.uk

One of the most vital (and often life-threateningly boring) parts of SEO is tracking the statistics for the sites you’re working on. As I came in this morning, I nearly fell asleep as I sat down to yet another SERP report, another Webmaster Tools error report, and yet another Analytics page. Luckily though, for all my complaining, the tools I do have, are extremely good ones, and track the progress of my sites (or lack there of), extremely well.

My first port of call in the morning is a lovely little program called Web Position Gold, which despite not being the most aesthetically pleasing piece of software, allows me to track an (almost) unlimited number of key phrases, through an extremely large number of search engines, and regional search engines. Though admittedly Google is pretty much the only one that really gets a look in.

Upon completion it provides me with a summary of my SERPs, and a graph to indicate search engine saturation and visibility.

Very nice.

It then provides me with a breakdown of every key phrase that I am tracking for that particular domain, where it is currently ranking, what page it is linking to, and where it was ranking during the last time I ran the report.

This is by far the most essential internet marketing tool that I use, and I could not survive without it. You can’t optimise for keyphrases if you don’t know where they rank!

My next port of call for a client in the morning is to have a look at their traffic report for the last 2 months. Traffic reports aren’t only a good indicator of how well your site is doing from one month to the next, they also provide a good benchmark for how many effective links you have coming into your site that are actually being clicked on a followed, and show seasonal peaks and market trends very well. My package of choice varies for this one as the information is pretty basic at best, but AwStats is my first preference, or Google Analytics if AwStats data is unavailable.

The next big ones to hit are your Search Engine Saturation and Link Popularity reports. I obtain these from MarketLeap and find that they provide really good and accurate results, though there are various other web applications that perform a similar process. The search engine saturation report provides detailed information about how many pages of your site have been indexed in Google, Msn, and Yahoo – while the link popularity report scans these same search engines for inbound links to your site, then gives you the grand total! One thing I particularly like about MarketLeap is that they give you a trend graph for both of these reports, providing you (and your clients) with a good visual representation of the site’s progress over time.

Thats all for today, stay tuned for next time – when we hit the glories of Webmaster Tools, Spidering your site, and Analytics data!

John

No related posts.