Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips and Techniques [Page 10]

Tracking your search engine optimization results

To monitor the effectiveness of your SEO efforts, it's important to keep an eye on where your visitors are coming from. Here are a few suggestions.

1. Sign up and get familiar with Google Analytics
2. If you're paranoid about Google knowing everything, use a 3rd party keyword tracker, such as: Extreme Tracking | Stat Counter | Sitemeter | GoStats
   There are many others. Registering for a paid version will usually allow you to hide your stats from others.
3. Ask your webhost if they have any tracking software pre-installed. If you're comfortable with installing software on your site/server, try the open-source AWStats.

Conversion tracking

Search engine optimization is good; visitors are great; conversions are even better. Be sure to get a conversion tracking system implemented (e.g. Adwords conversion tracking, or Yahoo/MSN's equivalent) so that you can weed out ineffective keywords from your search campaigns.

If you have a small scale website, you can also use PHP/ASP/etc to monitor the pages that visitors are clicking to you from, and then record that data if they convert (e.g. make a purchase, register for your newsletter, etc). Start by saving a cookie with that info whenever a visitor comes to your site. Here's a PHP example that would go at the top of your landing page:

<?php
if (strlen($_COOKIE['camefrom'])<1) {
$tempvar = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
setcookie("camefrom","$tempvar",time()+60*130000); //130000 is 3 months
}
?>

Then record that data on your purchase/registration confirmation page. Here's some code:

<?php
$note="\n" . date("m/d/y") . "@" . date("h:m:s") . ":" . $_COOKIE['camefrom'];
$fp = fopen("referrals.txt", "a") or die("Error"); // Be sure to create file and set permissions
$numBytes = fwrite($fp, $note);
fclose($fp);
setcookie("camefrom","",time()-100); // deletes cookie
?>

If the referring page is a search engine, looking at the recorded data will often reveal the keywords that the visitor searched for.

Other search engine optimization tools

1. You've already seen my most useful SEO tool: keyword density analyzer
2. Along the same lines, this free SEO tool checks your landing page structure, which is important.

A variety of useful SEO add-ons have been created for the Firefox browser::

1. SEO for Firefox - Enhances Google/Yahoo search results with Alexa ratings and more.
2. Rankquest - Displays keyword density and other useful information about your site.
3. Load Time Analyzer - Details on your page loads times, which is a factor in Google page score.
4. Web Developer Toolbar - From a search engine optimization perspective, it's great for viewing your image Alt tags, etc.

There aren't too many paid services that I think are necessary for a small Internet marketer, but the exception would be an objective (not run by a search engine) keyword service. Here are two suggestions:

1. Wordtracker.com
2. KeywordDiscovery.com

I don't receive any payment/commission from the above suggestions. If I find something better, I'll post it here.

 
More Internet marketing and website promotion ideas.