In my last article I talked a bit about search engine optimization, so I wanted to follow up on that by discussing just how to do that. SEO reminds me of snake oil. A lot of people are paying companies to do it, but they don't really know how or what they are doing. I have seen some companies pay for search engine optimization, yet they have no evidence that anything has been done or improved. One way to measure the results is to compare your search engine keyword rankings over time. If you are in the business of selling Tunisian turnips and you listing goes from the 3rd page to the 1st page for "Tunisian turnip" then great, that is an improvement. You have a better chance of capturing people that search for that keyword. However this isn't a complete part of the equation. Are people that conduct that search actually clicking through to your website and are they staying on your website?

You need web analytics to help figure out how many people are coming to your website and how often. Most web hosting packages include some type of analytics application; just about every website host I have used provides Webalizer by default. The problem with Webalizer is that it includes traffic from search engine bots, so it may look like you have a lot of traffic when you may actually only be getting 1 or 2 real users. Another problem is that the data is poorly presented and you have to do a lot of analysis on your own. For small business customers I often recommend Google Analytics. It is free, it provides powerful information, it only gives you statistics on actual website users, and it can be configured to email regular reports, so you don't need to worry about going to check the tool. Your webmaster can setup Google Analytics and set it to email you the information you would like to know about on a weekly or monthly basis.

So why should you configure Google Analytics? You can use it to collect powerful information about how many people are visiting your site, what they are looking at, and how long they are staying there. You can also find out what links they are clicking on to get to your site and what keywords they are searching for. When doing an organic keyword search campaign it is very important to take a look at the keywords users are using to find your site so you can work towards improving your ranking for those keywords and adding your site to search results for related keywords as well. This way you can compare to see if your "search engine optimization" did really improve your traffic.

How can you tell if your search engine optimization is actually paying off? Well with Google Analytics you will be able to see if you have an increase in traffic and how many of those are unique visitors. You can also track how many users are coming to your site from various keyword searches or from referring URLs. Of course if you don't want to bother with using the tool yourself you can ask your webmaster to create custom reports or summarize the data that you want.