Step by Step SEO to Measure Website Effectiveness
So you want to get noticed online for all the right reasons? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the set of tools and strategies for getting people to discover your website based on its content. Most articles you read about SEO stop there after describing the technical stuff. But good SEO is tied to your online marketing strategy. It is really important for you to be able to attract people to your website who will benefit from being there and likewise create some benefit for you as well.
So we are starting a series of step-by-step SEO blogs that will provide you a plan for novices (and others) to understand, evaluate and think strategically about SEO. If you’ve been wondering how to implement an SEO strategy, just check in every Monday for the next step in our SEO series.
Today’s blog provides a plain English definition of terms important to SEO. Future blogs will take you through each of these areas and explain why they are important, and how to incorporate them into your SEO strategy.
- Analytics program: This is a tool that provide statistical information about activity on your website. It is provided free by your hosting company or by another online service such as Google.
- Hits: This was a term used early on in the web world to indicate how many visitors came to a site. Hits are actually NOT a visitor count. Hits are the number of files downloaded from a server when a page is called for. So if you have an HTML page that has 10 photos on it, when somebody types in that page URL, there will be 11 hits to the server (1 HTML page + 10 photo images).
- Visitor count: This is the number of distinct visitors who have visited at least one page on your site. It is measured by the IP address (Internet connection point) assigned to one computer. So practically speaking, two people could share a computer and it would only count for one visitor. But generally speaking, this is a good indicator of how many people view your site.
- Unique visitors: If a person visits your site on different days during the same period, this is counted twice in the visitor count. To measure unique visitors, your analytic program adjusts for this and counts each IP address once.
- New visitors: This is the number of new IP addresses that view a page on a site during a particular period. This means that since the inception of your analytics software, this IP address has not visited up until this point.
- Page views per visit: This is the average number of pages that a visitor views before leaving a website. Depending on your analytic program, you may see this as an average of all visitors or you may be able to get data distinguished by some other criteria e.g. new visitors.
- Bounce rate: If a visitor views your site and leaves immediately, you will have a high bounce rate. There is no set standard about how fast this must happened before a visitor has “bounced.” However most experts agree that visitors typically will leave after 15 seconds if they don’t believe a website is interesting to them. It is said that a high bounce rate is an indication that your site does not pertain to the information the individual is seeking. A high bounce rate could be an indication of a poorly designed site, insufficient content, or poor SEO bringing in people from keywords that are not relevant.
- Time on the site: This is just what it sounds like and your analytics program may have a way to view additional variables in combination with this e.g. unique visitors.
- Top Content: This is information about the most popular pages on a website. Typically an analytics program will sort the pages and display how many people visited the page in numbers and percentage of all visitors.
- Page views: This is the official term for number of pages viewed on the site.
- Referring site: If a viewer does not type your URL directly into their browser to arrive at your site, they must have found a link on another site or used a search engine to discover your website. The site that provides the link to your website is called the referring site.
- Traffic source: This indicates whether the person came from a link on another site, from a search engine, social media site, etc. The traffic source tells you the types of sites that are referring your readers, while the referring site gives the actual URL of the source.
- Landing pages: This is information about the first page that visitors arrive at when they come to your site. In other words, they may not come to your site through the home page, but the link they followed may lead directly to a page within your site.
- Exit pages: This tells you the page visitors were looking at right before they left your site. This information ties into the bounce rate. If you have a high bounce rate, look at your exit pages and see where people are leaving.
- Organic search: This is a term used to describe a search that is based only on keywords. This means that the results are not influenced by paid advertising or other factors.
How can a post like this have no comments?!?
Brilliant in its simplicity Stephen
Thankyou for outlining SEO into measurable and applicable marketing chunks AND defining how we can use these measures to change our SEO approach within our own site.
Alex,
Thanks for your comment. I think some people write comments about SEO assuming that everyone’s experience will be the same. My focus is that you know your strategy and you must think before you implement anything e.g. SEO
There is a new post coming out today with some guidelines for interpreting analytics. No “comments”!
Steve
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Hi stephen, this is a great article. I wanted to ask you one thing if you know then please inform me or update another post.
Is there any measuring tool where people can rate website reputation or standards. Like say, there is a website called A. Reader A rate this website A good. Reader B rates bad. Reader C rates fraud or whatever. Hope you got the point.
Great post, Information about these Issues Always seem to make my day better!
Super unique and wicked point of views displayed no this blog, thanks for posting this stuff all the time.
Great blog posting, very good information. waiting for your next post..
Really nice post. Very Informative and helpful post. thank you.
Step by Step SEO to Measure Website Effectiveness | Simple Web Toolbox
Excellent post. Keep writing. Thanks.
[...] the first article on understanding and implementing a plan for SEO, we discussed the terminology of Measuring Website Effectiveness. Let’s discover what these terms mean in relation to your website and how visitors use [...]
very interesting, learn a lot!.