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By Greg DiFalco
The Right Software
Traffic/Conversions: If your goal from the start has been more traffic, then utilizing your traffic analysis tool to track visits and pageviews should be relatively easy. If your host provides raw log files, then they can be plugged into a log analyzer such as WebTrends. Make sure your host has Referral Tracking turned on. This enables the software to track search engines and keyword referrals. Then, from month to month, it will be easy to view totals on such things as visits, pageviews, keyword referrals, 404 errors.
On the other hand, if you want live up-to-the-second results, including in-depth campaign tracking statistics to measure traffic and conversions/leads, you will want to utilize one of the big 3 software packages: Google Analytics (formerly Urchin) (free), HitBox Professional ($34.95 per month) or Omniture SiteCatalyst. You'll be able to use any of these three packages to track the progress of your SEO campaign and how well your site is selling.
The time, effort and cost of installing and configuring this software are vital to the success of your marketing campaigns, particularly because of their ability to track the various sources of traffic and leads. Without this software, you are “flying blind” when spending money on marketing campaigns. If you send out regular email blasts, beyond statistics provided by your email program, Web analysis software can measure conversions based on clicks, paths through the site and various other user activity statistics. You and your SEO account manager will learn what is working and what isn’t and, thus, arm you with information that will help you make the right decisions about each campaign.
Tinkerers Welcome
An SEO campaign is not finished if the website isn’t number one for all target keywords. Thus, it’s always necessary to continue to tweak title tags, meta data and on-page copy within the site to improve keyword rankings. For example, let’s say you got to page one for your top keywords, but you got stuck at number eight in the rankings. In order to propel your ranking higher you can both consider targeted link campaigns and tweak the density of the keyword on the page. All other things being equal (not that they ever are on the Web), you should ascend the rankings after increasing the keyword density.
The Search Engine Optimization process does not end once the initial work is implemented. It is an ongoing process of measuring, analyzing and tweaking. Just because the numbers are up, don’t assume that there is no room for improvement. Your SEO account manager will never be happy until you have number one rankings on all of your target keywords on all of your target search engines. Since that is not likely to happen any time soon, be prepared to commit yourself to a long-term SEO plan.
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