This site is all about how to write content – SEO Copy – that will make your website more successful.
But what do we mean by ‘successful’? You may say that your sales have gone up, but how and why? Which pages of your site are bringing in the visitors? And, much more important, which pages are attracting buyers?
Although Leo Babauta at Zen Habits makes a convincing personal case for not measuring anything, I need the numbers. I was good at maths at school, I read Physics at university for a while, but graduated in Psychology, with a strong bias towards experimental design and measurement. That says I don’t duck out on knowing what works.
I live and breathe data as well as words. And that should be your goal, too. It could make all the difference between a successful site and one that struggles to pay even its hosting fees.
Start measuring right from the start
When I started working on Writing For SEO I invested a considerable amount of time and effort in making sure I had my WordPress platform as near perfect as I could get it. I’ve set up a good many WordPress sites over the past few years, so I know what plug-ins I like, and had a few new discoveries I wanted to use.
Those, and the theme, all got installed before I started soft launching with some content. But, along with the WordPress stuff, I installed the tools I’d need to measure the site’s performance.
Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools
Thankfully, the measurement solution is free and easy to set up.
If you have a Google Account, head over and set up Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools and link them together. They’ll give you nearly all the data and information you’ll need.
Don’t worry about not knowing how to interpret the data. Get them installed and make sure your data is collected from Day One. Or if you have a live site without Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, you should get both installed as soon as you can.
And in later posts, I’ll show you what you need to know to make sense of the data you collect.
Image courtesy of Pat Pilon.