Monitoring and analyzing your traffic and user behavior
Even if you have applied all the proper search engine optimization tips, it might take about 2-3 weeks before search engines crawl and index your site. Until then, get acquainted with several traffic statistics tools that will help you monitor and analyze the behavior of your site visitors and adjust your site strategy accordingly:
1. Site Statistics tool will let you monitor the hits to your site and pages on a daily and monthly basis, as well as the sites referring visitors to you.
2. Google Analytics (GA) is a free statistics tool that gets easily integrated into your site using the HTML snippet. The interface provides detailed dashboard-type information and in-depth reports on the behavior of your site visitors such as the time visitors spend on each page from your site, referrers, search engine queries your visitors used to find you, links they clicked, the last page they visit before leaving your site, etc. To integrate GA in your site:
- signup for an account at http://www.google.com/analytics/. - you'll be provided with a piece of code which will track activity on your pages. - copy the code and paste it in an HTML snippet, added at the top area of your site right next to the logo. - make sure you preview a confirmation in your account that the code can generate data from your site.
3. Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) provide information on your pages visibility in Google, with detailed reports on your site links, the search queries through which your users arrive at your site, etc. Inside the interface you may also upload a sitemap. Google webmaster interface requires verification of your site before you may view your site statistics. To get verified by follow these steps:
- in your GWT account click the 'Verify' button located next to the URL of your site - select 'Upload an HTML file' verification method from the dropdown menu - you'll preview a verification code, similar to 'google54f624018e376838.html' - in your site create a new page and set the code as its title omitting the last '.html' string. - in your GWT account click the 'Verify' button.
