1. Understanding how search engines see your site
2. Understanding how visitors see your site and how they find it

How Search Engines See Your Site

Search engines crawl web pages as part of the Internet in order to help searchers find what they are looking for. In order to maintain the quality of search results and to make sure the information is properly displayed, search engines give site owners information and statistics on how their sites appear.

Using this information, you can tailor your site and pages so the search engines more accurately reflect your site.

If you haven’t already, be sure to signup for an account to review your site’s results in each of the following:

• Google Webmaster Tools (your gmail account will work)
  • http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
• Yahoo Site Explorer (your yahoo email account will work)
  • http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
• Bing Webmaster Center (your hotmail or live email account will work)
  • http://www.bing.com/webmaster

In order to access the information about how your site appears in search, you must first “claim” your site.

Each search engine uses a similar method. You either put a line of code into your index file or you upload a special file the search engine gives you. This allows the search engine to prove you have access to the site and are authorized to see the information related to it.

Example of Google’s Webmaster Tools:

Example of Yahoo’s Site Explorer

Example of Bing’s Webmaster Center

Your Webmasters Tools account will give you the ability to see where your site ranks for keywords and phrases, manage your sitemaps, and see if there are any problem with your site.

When optimizing your site for search engines, you need to know how and where visitors go on your website at your finger tips.

An Analytics package provides that information:

• How many visitors per day? Per month? Per year?
• How long do they stay?
• Who are they?
• Where are they coming from?
• Where do they live?
• How did they find your site?
  • Links from another site?
  • Typed in your url?
  • Searched for your services?

While this SEO course focuses on how visitors used search engines to find your site, you need to understand as much as possible about your customers in order to maximize your internet presence.

In choosing an Analytics package, be sure that it will provide answers to all your questions.

Webalizer and Awstats

These two packages are very similar as they present information from the server logs in a readable format.

There is not a lot of depth, instead it provides basic hits, ip information and referring url information. You are able to get useful information but it can be challenging and time consuming to put the information into meaningful reports.

The biggest advantage for these two packages is they are generally pre-installed as part of your hosting account. Free of charge. There are, however, other free solutions that provide more usable and meaningful statistics.

PHP Stats

If it is important for your organization to keep your analytics information in-house without using a third party, this solution may be for you.

PHP Stats is an open source software package that you install on your servers. It will then record all the information about the visitors to your site.

It requires including a snippet of code on every page of your site. When the web-page is loaded, so is the snippet of code and it will record information on the visitor.

Since the snippet of code is called directly through the visitor’s browser, more information can be learned and stored. The analytics package also provides a lot more reporting options. You will easily be able to answer the critical questions you need to understand about your visitors and how that applies to your business. That ultimately allows you to better optimize your site for search engines and for sales.

PHP Stats falls short in delivering advanced reporting, sales funnels, advanced traffic patterns and the ability to track customer conversions and sales.

Google Analytics

Originally designed to help Google Adwords clients understand the impact of their advertising dollars, it has expanded into the most robust and complete analytics package available for free.

Similar to PHP Stats, Google Analytics requires a snippet of code to be installed on each page of your site. The big difference between the too is the depth of information and the number of different ways you can manipulate the data with Google Analytics. Even if you discover Google Analytics doesn’t have a report for what you’re looking for, you can export all the data and generate it yourself.

The drawbacks of working with Google Analytics are the statistics only update once a day, usually after 24 hours, and your data is stored with a 3^rd party. That being said, I believe the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks.

I recommend using Google Analytics as your statistics package. Google is constantly building, developing, and improving their package. That means you get the benefits of the improvements without having to spend any money developing them.

Once you have collected all the information that is available, you can then establish benchmarks and start optimizing your site for more search engine traffic.

This tutorial will provide step-by-step instructions on how to do that.

Step 1

Log into your Google Analytics Account by clicking here.

If you have a simple Google Analytics account with only 1 website profile, you will see the following:

Click on the User Manager

Step 2

Once you’re in the User Manager, click on + Add User

Step 3

1. Enter in the email address of the person you’d like to provide access to (it must be a Google Account) and choose whether you’d like them to be able to Administrator of the Account or only be able to view reports
2. Select the website profile they will have access to (you can add more than one at a time, just hold down the Ctrl key while clicking)
3. Click add to move the website(s) into the “Selected Website Profiles” area
4. Save Changes

Then the user will have access to your Analytics. You can remove them at any time.

You know your business better than a search engine or a search professional. You need to target your search efforts in order to support your business otherwise you will simply waste your money building search for a product or service you don’t may not offer!

Identify the demographics of your customers. By answering some of the following questions you will get closer to knowing who you are selling to:

• Are they businesses or consumers?
• Are they predominantly male or female?
• What is their household or total sales (I the case of businesses) income?

While always important to identify where your customer is in traditional marketing, it is even more important for Internet marketing because the default geographic assumption for websites is “The World”

• Where are they located?
  • Are your products and services available worldwide?
  • If not, specifically where are they available? Define if it is within a country, a state or province, city, or defined neighborhood.

Google offers a free tool that can help you define your demographics based on website data they have available. It is primarily to help advertisers choose what sites they wish to advertise on but you can still use the data.

This is not to replace your understanding of your consumers but to augment your understanding. Just put your website in the search field: Google Ad Planner.