Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 1

Employing Site Analytics

In This Chapter

• Discovering web analytics basics
• Measuring success
• Identifying what you’re tracking
• Deciding on your key performance indicators
• Examining analytics packages
• Analyzing log files

Web analytics are two words that can strike terror into the heart of any unsuspecting practitioner of search engine optimization (SEO). You’ve been monitoring your pay per click (PPC) campaigns (advertising campaigns in which you pay every time someone clicks your link), and you’re watching to see how well your pages rank within the search engines. So you should be able to do web analytics, right?

Well, web analytics can be a little more complicated than that. For a lot of people, web analytics seems to consist of wild guessing and reading tea leaves. It can be pretty complex, but we walk you through it so it hopefully makes a little more sense. In this chapter, we give you a basic overview of web analytics, before we dive into the nitty-gritty later on in this minibook. We go over how to measure your success in the search engines, identify what numbers you need to be tracking, point out key indicators to be watching when measuring your performance, and cover tools and software that help you with web analytics and what a log file analysis is.

Discovering Web Analytics Basics

Web analytics involves taking the information you glean from all your research and sitting down, looking at it, and figuring out what it all means. Bear with us: This can get a ...