Website Metrics that Matter

By Monica Green


It's very easy to get caught in the pattern of just checking web metrics like toolbar PageRank, rankings on the first 3 pages and the number of visitors to your site every day. However, there are some other important things to consider and do to get your site's search rankings moving in the right direction.

Measuring

Basic web analytics aren't the only indicators of success for your website. You will need to look at ways of monitoring success such as how many conversions your site makes, how engaged your visitors are and how many backlinks you have. The following are some of the very important things you will need to look at.

Conversions and Goals

Building a website and working to improve your online presence is not easy or cheap. It is important to see the value your investment is returning. Whether you are selling a product or simply educating visitors you will need to track your conversion rate. This is the ratio of the people who are visiting your website that are actually performing an action such as buying your product or downloading some sort of document you offer. Google Analytics is the tool that is most used for tracking these sorts of metrics.

Backlink Profile

The recent Google Penguin algorithm update was released to penalise websites with less than brilliant links in their backlink profile. It's always been important to source high quality links in order to achieve good search rankings but now more than ever before. If you don't ensure the quality of your incoming links you could be punished by Google with no opportunity to do anything about it.

A Complete Picture

While the Webmaster Tools services offered by both Google and Bing give you some information about your backlink profile, your best bet is to turn to a paid 3rd party SEO tool to get the job done properly. These tools will give you a better idea of what your backlink profile contains and help going forward.

Link Types

Once you can see your whole backlink profile there are things you'll want to keep an eye out for. Are your anchor text links too keyword heavy? Link building in the past may have been overdone with keyword or phrase based anchor text. It looks more natural if you mix it up with branded links or click here links. The most important thing is to have a good variation of different anchor texts. High percentages of the same keyword rich links could lead to penalties from the search engines.

SEO

There are a large number of websites that have been built for SEO purposes alone. They often contain content that has been spun, very simple page design and very little human maintenance. Use of these sites for links can be seen by the search engines as trying to cheat the system and lead to penalties.

Low Quality Backlinks

Bad quality links like these should be dealt with quickly. Contact webmasters to ask for their removal and keep proof of these requests in order to show you have tried to have them removed if asking for reconsideration from search engines.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...