How to “see” your blog traffic and if your SEO is working

May 16th, 2007 by Connie

Today’s part on blogging is my favorite part! How do you know that your efforts toward Search Engine Optimization is working? Well there are some easy ways to see stat’s on your traffic & I love checking these.

Are you ready to take a tour behind stage on our blog? Come with me then … I spent some time making screenshots of all these to share with you.

For all of these you need to sign up & follow their instructions. Most of the time that includes putting some form of code into the blog (a marker so to speak). I’m not going to include that because Heidi set them up & each one has it’s own instructions. (ie – ask her if you have questions & she’ll be glad to help J ).

Here we go:

Technorati has two features that we’re using.

1. Claim your blog – Claiming your blog establishes that you are its owner, and allows you to use Technorati services to increase your blog’s visibility.

This is important because it allows you to add tags to help increase your visibility. When you log into your account you can see how many blogs link to you (remember how I mentioned the importance of blogs linking to you? Here you can see the rank which is based on the # of backlinks that you have)

2. Pingback – pings or notifies a number of services that keep track of weblogs and publish them. By pinging, you let the services know that your blog has been updated and hence, they crawl and index your site, publishing your blog contents, thus increasing your blog’s popularity.

If you insert this code from Technorati in your blog, then everytime you update your blog, it automatically pings for you. (Who could remember to do it each time? I have trouble with remembering to tag my post the way it is!)

I also signed up with Pingoat.com for that service to automatically ping when we update our blog. (why? Because it looked good. Does it make a difference? Well we do have a lot of spyders (search engines) crawling thru…)

Now these are in order of my favorites for reviewing the stat’s

3. Google Analytics is the biggy for stat’s! Heidi found this & set it up. I was used to looking at the stat’s and then they switched to a new version which I haven’t had time to learn. So here is an overview of the options – and I warn you it’s comprehensive!

But if you do nothing else, I suggest you get this one for sure. There are some very cool features that I like are seeing the following:

- where your visitors are from

- what sites your visitors are coming from

- what they searched for to get to your site (keywords are so important as you tag & write more posts)

- trends in numbers of visitors, how long they were there, how many pages they viewed

- and the list goes on to languages, browsers, etc

4. Next, you must have Feedburner!

The first screen shows me all the ‘subscribers’, but if you look at them many are spyders & search engines cruising thru. That is good news! There are tabs on the left so I can see where people are coming from & what they’re searching for to get there, etc. I do like this one though

5. Mybloglog – this doesn’t update until the next day, but I like it. On one screen it provides:

- Where people came from: links to their sites & google searches

- What people viewed

- What they clicked on

6. Feedblitz.com – we have this set up to allow people to subscribe to our blog. Heidi set that up. She can tell how many people are subscribed & how many have unsubscribed.

7. Finally, don’t forget about your website stat’s if you have connected your blog to your site.

I realize that I’ve given you a lot. And we have added these slowly over time. But once you have them all cooking, it’s a lot of fun to check them once in awhile!