Measuring SEO results

Measuring SEO results and effectiveness; how to find out if your SEO efforts are bearing fruits.

Now that you have website that is live and has gone through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I am sure you would want to find out if your website is getting traffic because of your SEO efforts. Typically, it may be a good idea to wait for at least six months before you start evaluating your SEO efforts.It takes a while for SEO effectiveness to show up in terms of SEO rankings, traffic etc.

Here is what you can implement in order to get a good idea about traffic to your website –

1.Web Analytics tool

You will need a tool that will help you get data on traffic, keywords etc. Get Google Analytics installed on your website, it is free and provides you a lot of relevant data. Essentially targeted towards tracking paid advertising, it also provides data on organic or natural results.

Go to – http://www.google.com/analytics/

If you already have a Google account, you can login using that id or register for a new account. Before that you can get a taste of what Google Analytics all about out here-
http://www.google.com/analytics/tour.html

Google’s tutorials on analytics are very helpful. I will take up analytics in detail in my next post.

2. Google Webmaster tool

This is a very useful tool for measuring SEO effectiveness and results. I would recommend this to everyone who has a website. This is such a useful tool that it should by default be included in your planning and strategy.To start with go to the Google webmasters help page-
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/

The tool will help you diagnose problems, it will tell you about your website’s accessibility issues, you will find out how many pages link to your site, which keywords were used to reach your site and much much more.

3. Alexa

Alexa will give you an idea about your website’s popularity but it is not absolutely entirely correct since it depends of various factors.

I will take up each of these tools separately in my subsequent posts.But for now, go ahead and get registered for Google Analytics and webmaster tools account. I promise you, these tools will help you in measuring your SEO results to a large extent.