Before we get started with any kind of SEO, we want to establish benchmarks for your website. Without benchmarks, there’s no way of knowing if our SEO work is doing us any good. So in this post I’ll introduce you to some important questions, and a couple of tools you’re gonna love.

Important benchmark questions

• How many visitors are coming to your website?
• What pages are they visiting while they’re there?
• How are they navigating around in the site?
• How are they getting there? If from search engines, what terms (keywords or keyword phrases) are they searching on to find your site?
• How long do they stay on your site before they go away?
• What’s your bounce rate? (visitors coming to your site and leaving before clicking around in your site)
• What is your conversion rate?  (A conversion is getting someone to give up their contact information)
• What are your most popular pages?
• What’s your Google Page Rank (PR)?
• How many sites link to your website?  What pages do they link to?

You need to find these things out now. So here’s the plan. In order to do this, you’re gonna need to have access to your website, because we’re gonna upload some stuff up there. It’s OK if you have a Webmaster, he can do this for you.

Google Analytics

Google has a wonderful tool that’s absolutely free, that will answer most of these questions for you. It’s called Google Analytics. Once you setup Google Analytics, you can track all these metrics for your site day-to-day, and over time.

I’m gonna give you a little instruction about how to find & setup this tool, then give you the link and let you play around with it.  Questions? Post them here and I’ll respond.

In order to use Google Analytics you’ll need a Google account.  If you have one already, great.  If not, just go to www.gmail.com and setup a free email account.  Use the email account - or not - doesn’t matter.  This will be the email and password you’ll use for ALL of Google’s outstanding services.  Isn’t that cool?

Once you have your gmail account, you’ll want to go to Google Analytics.  Hang on, not yet!  I gotta type some more first.

You will signup for an account, then tell Google what website(s) you want to monitor.  That’s right, I said sites. Set one up for your website.  Another for your blog.  Another for any other site you want. You’ll find this functionality under “Create New Website Profile”.  Here’s what it looks like:

Setting up a new domain

When you click “Finish” you’ll get a page that looks like this:

Google Gobblygook

Presto! Google generates some Javascript code for you!  Don’t even THINK that you need to understand this crap.  But what you DO need to do is copy it and paste it into each page of your website.  No doubt you have no idea how to do that. Neither did I.  That’s where you’ll find the “Common Questions” column on the right of this Googlepage helpful.

Before you click on any of that, though, you’ll want to save that code!  Copy it and paste it into Windows Notebook, and save it off someplace where you can find it later.

If you don’t feel comfortable doing this, have your Webmaster or somebody do it for you.

Once you have the GoogleGobbleyGook Javascript yaya running on your site, you can go back to Analytics and start getting some KILLER stats on your site that answer most of the questions we started with above.  Go back there after a couple days and just poke around.  You’ll be amazed at how much information  it gives you.

Most common blogging platforms (blogspot, wordpress) are able to handle Google Analytics pretty easily. You might have to do some searching around on the web to find out how to do it.

So, here’s the link to Google Analytics.  Go get ‘em, cowboy!

Links to your site

Linking to your site is called off-page SEO.  Think of this as a Miss America contest for search engines.  The more links you have inbound to your site, the more popular they think you are with the judges.  So they move your site right up the runway toward getting the crown!  (I know, corny analogy….)

Remember we were talking about Page Rank earlier? The higher the page rank of sites linking to you, the more authority they carry… and that leads to higher Google Juice.  So, a PR4 site gives you way more juice than a PR0 site.  (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. Google Pagerank goes from 0 to 9.  We’ll go over how to find pagerank for any page later.)  So later on, we’ll find some high-ranking sites to build links back to yours.

For now, though, we’re concerned with benchmarking where you are today… so that when we start building links, we can track how we’re doing.

Yahoo! Linkdomain

Yahoo has a great little tool for discovering your links - both within your site and from outside.  This is a lot simpler than the other one.  Easy to get to, easy to use.

Simply go to Yahoo!, and type this in the search box:

linkdomain:www.yoursitename.com

Here’s the superslick report you’ll get back:

Yahoo LinkDomain

Here’s all your links - within and external to your site.  Click the little dropdown at the top left to select “Except from this domain”, to see all the external links to your site.

This is very important for benchmarking! Print the page and put it in a folder somewhere.  We’ll be building links later, and the “before” picture will allow us to measure our progress.

Try this little linkdomain thingy out on your competition. Who’s eating your lunch?  Who’s the big boy in town you’d like to compete with for Internet leads? How many inlinks do they have?

Still with me?

I hope I haven’t freaked you out here.  If I did, maybe SEO isn’t for you after all.  Go back to the phone and make some cold calls.  The rest of us will chase some more warm leads.

These are only two of a bunch of tools you’re gonna want to use, moving forward.  More later.

To your wealth!