How To Monitor The Success Of Your Site
Your website might be doing great, but how can you tell?
Bumper-to-bumper traffic is just the worst. According to wikitravel.org, the Los Angeles freeway system handles over 12 million cars on a daily basis. But when it is your website that receives heavy traffic, it can be a dream!
If you think of the internet as a map of the world – New York, London, Tokyo – these are the big-time players in the world of site visits, that is, your Google, your YouTube, your Facebook. The areas on the world map that show up as massive swathes of green and whose inhabitants are smelly men with exceptionally long beards who braid the vines of willow trees as a pastime, these are what you want to avoid when it comes to website traffic. How can you ensure that your website is a well-oiled network of pages that plays host to a bustling center of unique site visitors from a vast array of sources? Put the pedal to the metal, turn the radio up, and read on.
One of the most trusted and foolproof ways to keep track of the online goings-on of your site is Google Analytics. It is a great way to monitor how many visitors are accessing your site on a daily basis, and goes further to provide detailed information on those visitors. Google Analytics starts with some basic info on site traffic, like visitors’ geographical location (be it big city dweller or willow tree braider), what links they click, and how much time visitors spend perusing your digital delicacies. Things get much more in depth from there, and soon you will find yourself analyzing complex high-level site information, like how many times a bookmark was added for a particular page or when visitors search for on a given a page. Here are the basic steps to setting up Google Analytics:
01. Go to http://www.google.com/analytics and sign into your Google account.
02. Click the “Access Google Analytics” button in the upper right corner of the page.
03. Fill out the info on the setup screen.
04.Install the tracking codes into your HTML code. You can double check you’ve done this correctly by going to the spot you copied your tracking code from – it should say, “Status: Receiving Data.” You might need to wait up to 24 hours to see this.
05. Set up a second admin. This is essentially backing up all of your Google Analytics in case you should ever have trouble signing in or accessing your info. Google spells out exactly how to do this here.
If you would like to try another awesome tool to see how you stack up in SEO performance, have we got a great suggestion for you! It’s the 100% FREE SEO report available from the Midphase SEO Guru! Just enter three pieces of very basic information – the site address, your name, and your email address – and we will give you a rundown of how your site performs, all in a very user-friendly and easy-to-understand format. The big difference between Google Analytics and Midphase’s SEO Guru is that Google gives you graphs, numbers, and charts. Midphase on the other hand spells out the results in easy-to-understand sentences, as well as giving you recommendations for the next steps you should take to get your site as busy as Los Angeles on a Friday night before a holiday weekend (minus the utter lack of motion). You will get an overall score based on how well your site measures up to the competition, plus search terms that visitors use to find your site from search engines, the time it takes your site to load, and a black-and-white breakdown of what your site does well and what your site needs to work on. Midphase’s SEO report also offers a free trial of our fully fledged suite of services, so you have the chance to delve even deeper into your site’s report card.
With these two tools in your belt, you’ll be off and away to monitoring the success of your website. By having a roadmap of your site traffic, you can initiate construction projects to improve spaghetti junctions and bottlenecks, ending up with a free-flowing pattern of site visitors! Take a look and get to know your site traffic today.
Midphase has the tools you need to create and maintain a website without any roadblocks.