Keeping track of where you stand for purposes of evaluating the effectiveness of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts is a key to making them work well for you. But what is the best way to do that? Here are several tips for gauging how well your SEO is working.
Page Rank
Just do a search for your keywords and see where your web site falls. If it’s in the top five ranks on the first page, as a result of a search around the most important key words, you’ve got good visibility and traffic is likely to come. If not, you might want to look at improving the relevance of the site’s content, form, meta-data, etc. to those keywords.
Site Visits Per Month
The whole idea behind SEO is to drive more people to visit the web site, so this is really the acid test. If you have a high number of monthly site visits, that’s an initial indicator that your SEO strategy is working. However, it’s not the final indicator, not the be-all and end-all.
Page Views
No, this is not the same measure as site visits. It’s a measure of the number of times people view pages incorporated into your web site. The problem is that someone may see your page show up on a search, click the link thinking it might be what they’re looking for, quickly determine that it’s not, and go back. If that happens, you haven’t driven any business your way. This is a sign that you haven’t done a good job of relating keywords to content.
Time On Site
This has to do not only with the effectiveness of SEO but also with the design of the site itself. A site that is well designed, easy to navigate, and easy on the eyes will find people spending more time on the average browsing it. It relates to SEO as well, for the same reason that page views does: a person who clicks a link by mistake isn’t going to spend a lot of time on the site, most likely, while someone who finds content appropriate to what he’s searching for will.
Links From Outside
Perhaps the real acid test is how many links are created from outside web pages inbound to yours. Inbound links are an important way to drive traffic your direction, and they also increase the site’s ranking in searches. When people are linking your site on their Facebook pages, referencing and linking your site in their blogs, and so on, then you know you are receiving not only high volumes of traffic but high quality traffic as well.
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