Apr 8th, 2008
BLOG METRICS: BOOST YOUR BLOG SEO USING THE GOOGLE GOLDMINE
Blog metrics is an inexact science at the best of times. You can however give your Blog SEO strategies a real boost if you know how to read the Google Goldmine (aka Google Analytics) - the deeper you dig - the more gold you may find buried.
Google Analytics provides a wealth of information and sometimes it can be fairly daunting to try and wade through it all. However if you can try to learn how to use it, one section at a time, you will the information is not only useful, but information you can act on.
If you look at the visitors section as an example. Google Analytics provides a nice graphical representation of how your visitors arrived on your site. Where they referred, did they come from a search engine or did they come directly? Dig a little deeper and you can get a breakdown of those statistics.
For example, you can see which sites have referred traffic to your site and in what numbers. You can also see which search engines are referring traffic to you. Dig a little deeper again and you will see what search terms the visitors are using to find your site. Now you are starting to get to the meat.
By identifying which search terms are being used, you can gain a greater understanding of where you need to concentrate your keywords optimization. If you are using a list of a dozen or so keywords yet only getting hits from half that list, perhaps it time to review your keyword strategies. Are the keywords still relevant? Do you need to concentrate on some keywords a little more?
Most blog metrics packages allow you to look at these statistics. With a little thought you can turn this raw data into valuable information that will enable you to fine tune your blog SEO strategies. Tweak a keyword here, remove another keyword and replace it with a longtail that is more appropriate; suddenly your targeted traffic starts to increase.
As your traffic grows from search engine referrals you will be able to refine your strategies even further. Blog metrics are often ignored or only looked at with a passing interest. If you spend a little a time, you find they are little gold mines, the further you dig, the more valuable the information can become.