Every web design­er under the sun talks about search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO), but it amazes me to see how often basic prin­ci­ples are ignored. I’m in-between jobs right now, which means I’m spend­ing a lot of time look­ing at poten­tial employ­ers’ web­sites. I’ve decid­ed to start a series of posts on SEO myths and real­i­ties that will talk about design­ing for max­i­mum visibility.

I’m not going to focus on any of the under­hand­ed tricks to fool search engines into list­ing an inap­pro­pri­ate page. Google hates this kind of tac­tic and so do I. You get vis­its for hav­ing good con­tent. Good search rank­ings are based on good con­tent and the best way to boost your con­tent is to present your page in a way that lets both humans and search engines find the con­tent they want. Part one is on web­site analy­sis and tracking.

Don’t assume that your web­site is easy to nav­i­gate. One of the neat­est things about the web is that we have instant feed­back on use. With just a lit­tle track­ing we can see what pages peo­ple are look­ing at, how they’re find­ing our site and what they’re doing once they’re here.

Javascript Trackers:

My most advanced sites are cur­rent­ly using four dif­fer­ent track­ing meth­ods. Most uti­lize javascript “bugs,” tiny snip­pets of code that send indi­vid­ual results to an advanced soft­ware track­ing sys­tem. I put the code inside a Move­able Type “Mod­ules Tem­plate” which is auto­mat­i­cal­ly import­ed to all pages. Installing a new sys­tem is as easy as cutting-and-pasting the javascript into the Tem­plate and rebuild­ing the site.

• AXS Vis­i­tors Track­ing System
  This soft­ware installs on your serv­er but don’t let that scare you: this is one of the eas­i­est instal­la­tions I’ve ever seen. AXS gives you great charts of usage: you can nar­row it spe­cif­ic pages on your site, or even par­tic­u­lar search engines or search phrases.
  There’s also a option to view the lastest traf­fic by vis­i­tor. I love watch­ing this! You can see how indi­vid­u­als are using the site and where they’re nav­i­gat­ing. I’ve been able to iden­ti­fy dif­fer­ent types of vis­i­tors this way and under­stand the com­plex­i­ty of the audience.
  It does­n’t seem like AXS is not being devel­oped any­more. The lat­est sta­ble ver­sion came out over two years go, which is a shame.

• Hit­Tail
  This ser­vice watch­es search-engine links and makes rec­om­men­da­tions for new key­words. I wrote about this ser­vice yes­ter­day in Blog­ging for the Long Tail.

• Reeferss​.com
  This is a sim­ple sim­ple bit of soft­ware. Like every oth­er track­ing sys­tem it keeps track of refer­rers: search engines and web­sites that bring traf­fic to your site. But unlike the oth­ers that’s all it does. Why care then? It pro­vides a real-time RSS feed of these vis­i­tors. I bring the feed into my “Netvibes” page (a cus­tomized start page, see below) and scan the results mul­ti­ple times a day.

• Google Ana­lyt­ics
  The inter­net’s gate­keep­er bought the Urchin ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny in April 2005 and relaunched the prod­uct as Google Ana­lyt­ics short­ly there­after. This is becom­ing an essen­tial track­er. It’s free and it’s pow­er­ful, though I haven’t been as impressed by it as oth­ers have. See its Wiki page for more.

Internet Trackers:

It’s easy to find out what peo­ple are say­ing about you online.

• Tech­no­rati
  This ser­vice tracks blogs but you don’t need to have a blog to use it, for Tech­no­rati will tell you where blogs are link­ing. Give it your URLs (or those of your com­peti­tors!) and you’ll know when­ev­er a blog­ger puts in a link to you. You can also give it key­words and find out when a blog uses them.

• Google Blog Search
  Google can also let you fol­low blog ref­er­ences or key­word men­tions on the blogs. Google will also track beyond blogs of course. Type “site:www.yourdomain.com” into the main Google search page and you’ll see who’s link­ing to your site (or to the com­pe­ti­tion). There are lots of oth­er ser­vices that track blogs and men­tions – Sphere, Blog­lines, etc. They all have dif­fer­ent strengths so try them and see what you think.

• Feed­burn­er
  The best RSS mas­sager has always focused on ways to track your RSS feed. They’ve recent­ly intro­duced page track­ing soft­ware too. It looks great but I just installed it this week. I still have to see if it’s as good as Feed­burn­er’s oth­er offerings.

Keeping on top of this flow of data:

It’s easy to get over­whelmed by all of this infor­ma­tion. Most of the track­ing ser­vices pro­vide RSS feeds (See The Won­ders of RSS Feeds for an intro). I use Netvibes, a cus­tomized start page, to pull these all togeth­er into a sin­gle page that I can scan every morn­ing. Here’s a screen­shot of part of my Netvibes track­ing page – the full page cur­rent­ly shows four­teen track­ing feeds on one screen:

So why is tracking important to SEO?

With track­ing you find out what peo­ple are look­ing for on the inter­net. This helps you cre­ate pages and ser­vices that peo­ple will want to find. You might be sur­prised to see what they’re already find­ing on your site. Some examples:

• Ana­lyz­ing one site, I noticed that few pages I thought were obscure were bring­ing in high Google traf­fic. I looked at these pages again and real­ized they did a good job of describ­ing the com­pa­ny’s mis­sion. I con­se­quent­ly redesigned the site home­page to fea­ture them and I made sure that those pages con­tained direct links to its most impor­tant services.

• When I start­ed work for anoth­er client I looked at their site and sus­pect­ed that they’re most impor­tant arti­cles were not being seen – vis­i­tors had to click through about four times to get to them. Six months of track­ing con­firmed my hunch and gave me the hard data to con­vince the exec­u­tive direc­tor that we made some small mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the design. Hav­ing this strong con­tent linked right off the home­page helped bring in Google traffic.