http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jr0AM6_tBs
SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO Ch 10 Pt 2 Review
This part of the chapter talks about analytical tools. And here is the list provided
Omniture
Fireclick
Mint
Sawmill Analytics Clicktale
Coremetrics
Unica Affinium NetInsight
Yahoo! Web Analytics
(formerly Indextools)
Google Analytics
Clicky Web Analytics
Piwik Open Source Analysis Woopra Website Tracking AWStats
You can take your pick of which ones you want to use. If you’re starting out, I would go with Google Analytics, Yahoo Web Analytics, Google Insights and Google Trends.
All the others can also work but I think you need some time to get used to using the other tools first.
I use a tool called Market Samurai, so you can check that out as well.
The chapter goes into more depth about the tools available through each search engine.
Google has its recommended tools, so do Bing and Yahoo.
Take a look at the video and at the transcript that follows this post for tools specific to each search engine.
You’ll get to read about the SEOmoz products available for analyzing the data about your website.
You’ll also get to see how you can apply the data you collect and this part of the chapter is very useful at getting specific examples of how you can use the different tools.
So take a look at the video and read the guide and you’ll get a good primer on what tools and what data you will want to get familiar with as you learn to measure your progress online.
As always if the information is useful, give it a ‘Like”,a “tweet”, a “Google+” , a “Pin”, many thanks for your support.
For those who want the text, read on, there is a transcript that follows.
Hey, Claude Pelanne here at Affiliate Starting Line. Welcome. This is the continuation of the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO video series. We’re in Chapter 10.
This is Part 2. Part 1 of the Chapter 10 review covered the recommended metrics, talked about direct referral and search traffic; told you how to compare performance versus market share, visibility, potential drops, what you do when certain things happen in search engines, conversion rate by query terms. We covered all of this in the first part. So you can review that. We talked about the “not provided.”
Then in the second part here, they give you some samplers of the kind of analytical tools you can look at, and they give you about 13 of them right here alone. I use Goggle Analytics. I haven’t used Yahoo Web Analytics very much. I have also used AW Stats. I looked at Woopra when they were first coming out, but I haven’t used them. All of these are all different types of analytical tools. If you’re just starting out, Google Analytics is free. You should learn how to use it anyway, and there is a ton of stuff you can get. At AW Stats you’ll find in the back office of your web hoster.
There’s an article here that they link to that they tell you to read so that you can figure out what tool might be useful for you. They also link to Google’s website optimizer. The website optimizer, as you can see here, has now been integrated into Google Analytics, so you’re going to want to set up Google Analytics, and then you’ll get the features of the website optimizer integrated into that. There is no separate product there now.
Metrics for measuring search engine optimization.
You know, it says that, “it can be difficult to track specific elements of these algorithms.” A lot of the data and how they work is proprietary. They talk about best practices, data points, but then they come here and suggest that not only do you have Google Webmaster tools and Yahoo Site Explorer to use and the Microsoft Webmaster tools, but there are certain commands you can use in different search engines. In the Google search engine, you can use the site command colon and then the name of the website, and it’ll give you a look at all of the pages that have been indexed in that site. They recommend Google Trends, Google Trends for websites and Google Insights.
This is Google Insight’s for search. You type in a term here, whatever you’re trying to research. You can set your parameters to search the whole web or products only or news or image. I usually go for products. If you want to go worldwide you can narrow it down to a market, the United States. You can set their time frame. Let’s see what happened in the last 12 months across all site categories, and you search. What it will do is it will come back in this case and gives me all the data regarding the United States for dog training by regional interests. It will give me some top search terms that are related to that keyword and the data for it. That’s one tool you can use, and I have a video that explains how to use Google Insights for search.
Google Trends. Google Trends does the same thing. Now in this case I didn’t filter. Let’s go by the United States and let’s do it in the last 12 months. So here you’re going to get some trend lines. You’ll get some relationship to what is happening in the news. It’ll give you an up-to-date look at the relevance of this, and then it will give you a breakdown here by state, by city, and you can actually drill down even more if you want to with these filters. Google Trends, I also did a web series about that. Trends for websites, this is only good for websites that are really active, large and really indexed very well. If your website is new, etc., you’re not going to show any data here.
Bing they also mention here. You can go to Bing, sign up and get into the Bing Back Office Tools; the Webmaster and their Microsoft Advertising intelligence. So these are some of the services they recommend for you to use. You can use the same site command for Bing to what is indexed, and then you can do an IP query. We just looked briefly at the advertising platform. Ask the same thing, and you can use the site command. These site commands can get more sophisticated. You can drill down and search by page for a website or by blog. Here they actually show you another commands, the link command, and it shows you information about links going to the URL you’re interested in.
Then it will give you a big breakdown here of the SEOmoz products. On the left-hand side they give you the SEOmoz products for pages, so you can measure page authority, you can measure page rank. It’s called mozrank. You can measure the page trust. You can measure the number of links on the page, linking root domains to that page, external links coming out of that page. Then you can do the same thing at the domain level; domain authority, domain mozrank, domain trust, total links going into the domain, number of linking root domains. These are all products that SEOmoz offers. It’s a subscription service, but it’s dynamite, top-notch data, and it’s an reliable as anything you’re going to get from Google.
Applying your data to your commands. They say, “what do you do with all this stuff?” Then they’ll sit here and give you some scenarios of what you might do if, for example, search traffic from a single engine falls, but the search traffic from the other engines stays. They’ll recommend maybe you’ve been penalized. Usually, you’ll see a fall in traffic from Google in relation to Yahoo and Bing, and then they give you some options here of what you may have done to create that falling traffic.
Now, if they fall across all three search engine, you might have a robot.txt problem. That is, you have blocked the search engines from indexing at all. If it’s just falling from one search engine in relation to the others, then you may have a penalty situation. Search traffic from multiple search engines, that’s exactly what it is. Individual fluctuations, it brings that back to what I just said. You’re going to see all sorts of fluctuations, gains and losses, over time. That’s why you want to keep track of your data.
There was a thing, and there still is, Google Dance. If you’ve got a brand new site, not a lot of trust, not a lot of authority, you’re going to appear in the rankings. If you appear high up in the rankings quickly, expect to get bounced around. It might take three or six months before things stabilize and you re-appear. I had a website appear on page 1 after about eight weeks. It stayed there. I was making nice sales, and then it disappeared; completely vanished. Broad, exact, everything. Then 30 days later it re-appeared and back on page 1. It stayed there for about a year, and then it disappeared in broad, but it’s still there in exact. That’s the name of the game.
Positive increases in link metrics without ranking increases, that simply means that you’re getting good data, but you may not see yourself moving up through the results as quickly as you would like. It takes time. I mean, what they’re basically saying here is give yourself some months worth of work at it before you really get a consistent ranking and a consistent position.
Until you have put in some time, built some authority, built some trust and built some links, you’re going to pop around. That’s really the gist. There’s a lot of stuff here in Chapter 10, but you really have to take yourself through it individually and play with each one of these concepts and each one of these tools. It is a very good repository and a suggestion list of things to do and tools you can use.
That’s it for Chapter 10 and the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO. This is a great, great document for anybody just starting out. It’s a must, even for people who’ve been around. I always read it, and I always learn and pick up something new. I don’t think you ever know enough of SEO anyway. It’s a nice refresher course for some of you and it’s a perfect place to start for others. And that’s it.
I hope this video has been helpful. This is Claude Pelanne of Affiliate Starting Line. Stay with it, stay well, and we’ll talk to you soon.
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