EggRage.co.uk

Welcome back to part 2 of SEO Stat Packages, in part 1 I gave you an overview of Web Position Gold, traffic reports, link popularity, and search engine saturation. Today, we’ll take a look at Google Analytics, Xenu, and Google Webmaster Tools.

So lets get started!

After running all my reports from the previous post I move swiftly on to (and from) Google Analytics. I say swiftly because it is just that, generally speaking not a lot of time is spent on Google Analytics just because it provides a lot of basic information that is available in more detail from other stat software. If you don’t do any other stats, Analytics is a great one to have because it does give you a very good general overview. I find though, that the information is too basic (at least for my needs).

Where Analytics comes into its own though, is with ecommerece tracking. Analytics provides a really great overview of online sales, revenue generation, adsense campaigns, and conversion rates from both key phrases and specific search engines. If your site has an online shop, the value of having Analytics installed multiplies by a factor of ten. Make sure when installing though that you use the new ga.js not the old urchin.js – especially when wanting to set up ecommerce tracking.

Once I’ve had a brief skim over Analytics I move on to the part of SEO statistics analysis that I hate most; error reporting. This is basically checking for parts of the site that are either not there, or not functioning correctly, and are causing the search engines problems when spidering. Needless to say, fixing these problems nine times out of ten is just as big of a headache.

Sometimes websites just go wrong, pages disappear, dynamic scripts are executed wrong, and databases re-arrange themselves before shooting off to the pub for a quick pint. There’s no real way of stopping it from happening, so the best thing to do is accept that its going to happen, be ready for it, and check for these errors on a regular basis to catch them out early.

Our first stop on error reporting will be with Xenu. When search engines look over a site, they send out a spider. Its called a spider because it follows the web (the world wide one) and explores all the links it finds and follows them too, clever eh? So a spider is basically a script that tests every link on your site.

Xenu is a free program (windows) that is your own personal spider, you can fire it up, tell it what site you want it to look at, and off it goes with its 8 furry little spider’s legs. Xenu reports any broken links or images found, so basically any tag with an src or href attribute. Once its finished munching on flies and other such spidery things, it offers you a report, which will tell you where all you’re broke links are, and where they’re coming from. That was the easy part, now go fix them.

The second part of error reporting consists of using Google Webmaster Tools, which is possibly my favorite SEO statistic tool.

Hit the diagnostics tab and have a look at any errors that are coming up. Xenu looks at broken links to your site that are inside your site, Webmaster Tools looks at broken links to your site across the entire internet. This is done when Google ‘crawls’ the net. If a spider whisks round one website then a crawl is basically a really big slow version that does ALL the websites. As such you have to wait for these errors to come up, you cant test for them using independent software.

Errors will come up most frequently in this context when a page on your site no longer exists, now, if this is a product that you no longer sell then thats fine, just leave it and eventually Google will realise that the page is gone, and stop trying to find it. If its a page that has changed name though, you need to fix it.

For example, mysite.com links to yoursite.com/you.htm but a few months later you decide that you want to change that page name to you-are-great.htm – you upload the new file, and delete the old one. The new url for that page is yoursite.com/you-are-great.htm – but I don’t know that, and neither do the 6 million other sites that are linking to that page, so you need to apply a 301 redirect to tell Google where to go. More on 301 redirects at a later date.

Now that the error reporting is done, we can get on to the slightly more interesting side of Webmaster Tools, statistics!

Webmaster Tools gives you 2 little tables that I could not live without. ‘Top Search Queries’ and ‘Top Clicked Queries’.

Which basically tells you; out of all the searches that your site ranks for, what terms are searched for most often. (your most valuable key phrases to target) and which search terms that you rank for get clicked most often. If you’re ranking number 1 for a term that gets searched for a lot, but your site is never getting clicked on – you need to go and find out why that is! I could spend hours writing another post on this alone!

But for now, we will keep it just about the stat packages, and I may explore that avenue here at a later date. (I feel like I’m using the words ‘at a later date’ rather a lot at the moment!)

Was this helpful to you? Have I missed any stat packages that you’d recommend? Drop me a line in the comments!

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