In full "shape" my social buttons look like this:

There are several plugins that do social buttons in WordPress. As a lot of you may know, I used to maintain a plugin called Sociable back in the day when social buttons where all still 16x16, simple, buttons. At some point, I think it was Digg that introduced the script based social button with a counter in it, which was later on adopted by several social sites. To date, there are many many social bookmarking sites that have widgets like these. Not every site needs all of these social buttons. I picked the 5 that work for me, your mileage may vary.

How did you implement these social buttons in WordPress?

I hear you thinking "get on with it already". Ok ok ok. Here we go. It's not a plugin. It's in my theme. Which doesn't mean it couldn't be a plugin, it's just that it'd be pretty hard to embed them in my site as sweet as these social buttons are embedded right now, using a plugin.

So they're in my theme. As you can guess, the buttons themselves are a template part. This template part is actually rather small and simple, it looks like this (line breaks added for readability):

<ul class="social buttons">
  <li>
    <fb:like href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" send="true" 
      showfaces="false" width="120" layout="button_count" 
      action="like"/>
  </fb:like></li>
  <li>
    <a href="http://twitter.com/share" data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" 
      data-text="< ?php the_title(); ?>" data-via="yoast" 
      class="twitter-share-button">Tweet</a>
  </li>
  <li>
    <g:plusone size="medium" callback="plusone_vote"></g:plusone>
  </li>
  <li>
    <script type="in/share" data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" 
      data-counter="right"></script>
  </li>
  <li>
    <div id="stumbleupon-button"></div>
  </li>
</ul>

As you can see, these are the "regular" buttons for most of these services, with that exception that all of them are lacking the script tag. Back in february, Frederick did an awesome post on his blog about optimizing the performance of widgets & buttons. I used the knowledge in this post, but took it a few steps further.

Loading these Social Buttons script files

Let's start with Facebook. Their asynchronous code works quite well. First, make sure you have a fb-root div:

<div id="fb-root"></div>

Then load the JavaScript, (all of the code samples below should be within <script> tags):

window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
  FB.init({appId: '<APPID>', status: true, cookie: true, xfbml: true});
};
(function() {
  var e = document.createElement('script');
  e.type = 'text/javascript';
  e.src = document.location.protocol +
     '//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js';;
  e.async = true;
  document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e);
}());

This loads the Facebook JS once the page load is done, which works quite nice and then loads the app. Later on we'll be adding code to track all the interaction with the Facebook buttons, but let's load some other social buttons first.

The other scripts I'm going to load using jQuery. Not only do I load them asynchronously, I only start loading them when the page has actually already completed rendering. The code to do that for the Twitter share button looks like this:

jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
  // Load Tweet Button Script
  var e = document.createElement('script'); 
  e.type="text/javascript"; e.async = true; 
  e.src = 'http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';
  document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(e);
}

And LinkedIn, Google's +1 and StumbleUpon's buttons work in the same way:

jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
  // Load LinkedIn button
  var e = document.createElement('script'); 
  e.type="text/javascript"; e.async = true; 
  e.src = 'http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js';
  document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(e);
  // Load Plus One Button
  var e = document.createElement('script'); 
  e.type="text/javascript"; e.async = true; 
  e.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js';
  document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(e);
  // Load StumbleUpon button
  var e = document.createElement('script'); 
  e.type="text/javascript"; e.async = true; 
  e.src = 
  'http://www.stumbleupon.com/hostedbadge.php?s=1&a=1&d=stumbleupon-button';
  document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(e);
}

You could even simplify this further by just making it an array and looping through it, but for readability's sake I didn't do that.

Tracking Interaction with Social Buttons

When Google released +1, I quickly identified how to track interaction with that button. The obvious "follow up" was questions from people on how to track interaction with other buttons. Not for each of these social buttons tracking of interaction is actually possible. It depends on how the button was designed whether this will work or not. I got it working for Twitter and Facebook, so I'll share the code for tracking interaction with their respective social buttons below.

For Facebook, it's pretty well documented around the web how you can track the interaction with their buttons. I played around a bit and came up with the following implementation, which tracks the interaction with my like & send buttons and with the big like box on the right. It tracks the interaction in both Google Analytics and getClicky.

Instead of just the above FB.init line, we'll do the following:

window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
  FB.init({appId: '<APPID>', status: true, cookie: true, xfbml: true});
  FB.Event.subscribe("edge.create",function(response) {
    if (response.indexOf("facebook.com") > 0) {
      // if the returned link contains 'facebook,com'. It is a 'Like' 
      // for your Facebook page
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','Facebook','Like',response]);
      clicky.log(response,'Facebook Like Facebook Page');
    } else {
      // else, somebody is sharing the current page on their wall
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','Facebook','Share',response]);
      clicky.log(response,'Facebook Like / Share Post');
    }
  });
  FB.Event.subscribe("message.send",function(response){
    _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','Facebook','Send',response]);
    clicky.log(response,'Facebook Send Post');
  });
};

As you can see, if you can read a bit of code, this will create different events for each of the different optional actions. Now, let's do the same for the Tweet button (using examples based on their docs, but switched to async):

// Load Tweet Button Script & Associate Google Analytics Tracking
var e = document.createElement('script'); 
e.type="text/javascript"; e.async = true; 
e.src = 'http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(e);
$(e).load(function() {
  function tweetIntentToAnalytics(intent_event) {
    if (intent_event) {
      var label = intent_event.data.tweet_id;
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'twitter_web_intents', 
	    intent_event.type, label]);
      clicky.log(document.location.href,'Twitter '+label);
    }      
  }       
  function followIntentToAnalytics(intent_event) {
    if (intent_event) {
      var label = intent_event.data.user_id + " (" + 
	   intent_event.data.screen_name + ")";
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'twitter_web_intents', 
	   intent_event.type, label]);
      clicky.log(document.location.href,'Twitter '+label);
    }    
  }       
  twttr.events.bind('tweet',    tweetIntentToAnalytics);
  twttr.events.bind('follow',   followIntentToAnalytics);
});

LinkedIn has an API for these things, at least, it has documentation for it, but it doesn't work in my testing and quite a few people are complaining on LinkedIn's developer forums as well. For StumbleUpon there's no documentation to be found and it doesn't seem to be possible at this time to track interaction with their social button.

All of this is pretty geeky, I know, but there's a lot of value in both implementing these social buttons in a good and fast way and measuring all these interactions. Seeing which sort of social buttons work for which types of traffic can really help you find what you should be optimizing how.

Social Buttons: Adding them to your site & Tracking them is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>

Then you create your +1 button using Google's creation tool. On this creation tool you click on "Advanced options" and then add plusone_vote as callback. You'll get something like this:

And the code is like this:

<g:plusone size="tall" callback="plusone_vote"></g:plusone>

Last but not least, below the script tag for Google +1 we added above, you add this tiny bit of script. This function records the vote as an event in Google Analytics, and stores the state ("on" for a +1 vote, "off" for the removal off a vote):

<script type="text/javascript">
  function plusone_vote( obj ) {
    _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','plusone',obj.state]);
  }
</script>

Of course I haven't been able to do anything with the results from this yet, but it would be cool to see which kind of traffic uses +1 buttons, and whether a lot of +1's correlate with a lot of search traffic afterwards.

Update: might be fun to show you that this post was ranking quite fast with a nice +1 underlining:

Tracking Google +1 button Interaction in Google Analytics is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

As you can see from the announcement post, this new feature helps you determine questions like:

• Which landing pages are slowest?
• How does page load time vary across geographies?
• Does your site load faster or slower for different browsers?

You'll be able to find the results from this tracking under Content → Site Speed in Google Analytics. This release also fixes the slight error with the custom code option, that's now properly stripped from slashes.

Site Speed tracking in Google Analytics is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

How event tracking influences bounce rate

My buddy Avinash tweeted a link to a comment he left on a post that's actually an interview with him on the Bruce Clay blog. In the comment he talks about for whom bounce rate is a good metric. Michael Gray, an "old time" SEO and affiliate, who apparently hasn't learned much about analytics in all that time ( just kidding Michael ;) ), tweeted:

"As an affiliate or adsense publisher I want u to come and leave as quickly as possible how is that not a bounce."

Let me state this very clearly: it is not a bounce. A bounce is a visit to your website that doesn't result in a second pageview or a desired action. If you're an affiliate, the outbound click might very well be your desired action. To be able to properly optimize your campaigns, you should track these outbound clicks. The "proper" way to do that is to either track them as pageviews, with the benefit of being able to tag them as goals but with the disadvantage of inflating pageviews, or as an event.

Or, as the Google Analytics documentation describes it:

"[...] a "bounce" is described as a single-page visit to your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single GIF request, such as when a user comes to a single page on your website and then exits without causing any other request to the Analytics server for that session."

So, if you track your outbound affiliate clicks as events they wouldn't counted as a bounce. This way, these outbound clicks would be counted as a separate action, making the visit into a "non bounce" or, which is maybe a better name, an "engaged visit". This is independent of whether you use Google Analytics or another package, you could for instance use Clicky, a very good alternative for those of you with tin foil hats.

How to implement event tracking for affiliate links

In the examples below I'll assume you've properly hidden your affiliate links with a redirect:

Google Analytics

For those of you who use Google Analytics and are not smart enough to use WordPress and my Google Analytics plugin, you should be tagging your outbound affiliate links in a way similar to this:

<a href="http://yoast.com/out/vps/"
  onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','aff','/out/vps/']);">
  VPS.net
</a>

This example uses the asynchronous tracking method, if you want reliable tracking of outbound clicks like this, you should be using that, as it's a lot more reliable than the old synchronous method.

Clicky

In Clicky outbound link tracking of links like this is ridiculously simple, you don't even have to know javascript:

<a class="clicky_log_outbound" href="/out/vps/">
  VPS.net
</a>

Conclusion

In conclusion: please don't think you have a high bounce rate because you have an affiliate site. You have to tag your links properly, if you want to do serious analysis. The minute you do, you should be seeing these clicks appear in your analytics and your bounce rate go down, and you no longer have to claim visits that aren't bounces as bounces.

Event tracking, bounce rate and affiliate marketing is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

In the comments, my buddy Richard Baxter immediately suggested this would be a good addition to the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. The "problem" was/is that Mike's example was in PHP, doing the rank recognition server side. This won't work, as we all use W3 Total Cache to cache our pages, right? And then, we'd be storing the same rank over and over again, or no rank at all, or, well you get it, mayhem ensues.

So, I had to come up with a javascript version that does the same. Luckily, that's not too hard. You simply need to do two things: check that the referrer is coming from google and that it contains the cd= parameter. If it does, get the value out of it and store it in a custom variable. Here's an example using the asynchronous tracking code, which you could, if you wanted to, drop into your site's footer already if you have asynchronous tracking running:

if (document.referrer.search(/[\?|&]cd=/) != -1
  && document.referrer.search(/google\./) != -1) {
	var rank=document.referrer.match(/[&|\?]cd=([\d]+)/);
	_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',1,'rank',rank[1],3]);
}

This is now running on my blog as a test, when it works as I expected I'll add it to the plugin. The code sample above uses custom variable "index" or "slot" 1 to store the ranking. I'm using another "slot" one here on the blog, but my plugin would take care of that. I'd love to hear your feedback and ideas on other stuff to do with this!

Track SEO rankings with Google Analytics is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Since the debug script uses the console to display its information, I also added the option to immediately load Firebug lite. See how it works in the following screencast (ow and enjoy my new screencast intro, I'll be doing loads more screencast in the coming months):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google Analytics for WordPress gets a debug mode is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

There is something wrong however, with how this post is being treated by several social networks. First of all, there's Delicious. Check out this search; it'll show you Delicious has 12 different URLs for the same post. While the proper URL for the post has the most bookmarks, as much as 15% of all the bookmarks are for "wrong" versions of the URL. This means that the post could, in later searches on Delicious, do 15% better if the URL had been canonicalized / standardized properly, in other words, if all this stuff had been redirected to the proper URL.

Those wrong URLs are basically divided in 2 groups: StumbleUpon "framed" URLs and FeedBurner or otherwise "campaign tagged" URLs. Let's go through these groups one by one, and see if we can solve this.

StumbleUpon framed URLs

I very much dislike the fact that Delicious doesn't understand these URLs. Delicious should be able to "stab" through a URL like that, and then bookmark the proper URL. But I also actually dislike the way StumbleUpon puts a frame around URLs. Somehow, when Digg did this, it created an outrage, but if StumbleUpon does it, it's fine. Now their goals might be different, but I still dislike it. The "rough" solution is simple: add a frame breaker to your blog:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (top !== self) top.location.href = self.location.href;
</script>

The issue is that doing this would prevent people from voting up your site on Stumble, something you might actually want to happen. The second solution is adding a visible delicious button to your site so people can bookmark the post through that button, using the proper version of the URL. It's not as safe, but it might work for a part of the group that made the wrong bookmarks in the first place.

Google Campaign tagged URLs

These are the URLs that annoy me most. FeedBurner has the quite awesome option to campaign tag your posts, which means that it'll add variables to your URLs like this:

?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SmashingMagazine

Those give some awesome insight into where your readers come from, and it's a feature I'd hate to miss. However there's one issue with it, and it's in the very first part of that string: it's the question mark. The question mark has a real meaning in URLs: it allows you to add parameters to a URL. For that reason Google and other search engines, as well as sites like Delicious, can't automatically strip these off. There is, however, a very nice solution to this problem: campaign tracking using a hashtag.

This requires you to use the setAllowAnchor() function within your tracking code. After you've added that to your tracking code, you can now use #utm_source instead of ?utm_source, and suddenly the world looks much cleaner and nicer. Of course there's a small issue left: FeedBurner still uses the question mark based tracking. This is fixed by redirecting the question mark based campaign tagger URLs to the hash tag based ones.

This may all seem a bit daunting, but I've got some good news: if you use my Google Analytics for WordPress plugin, all you have to do is check a box under the advanced settings:

It will then automatically add the needed code and redirect all campaign URLs. Just another step towards a better optimized site, as this should prevent sites like delicious from bookmarking the wrong URL.

URLs, social media and campaign tracking is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The small version is used in the plugin heading on the admin page, a favicon version is used as a favicon for the admin page. I'll be also updating the plugin page here on yoast.com with it as well as several video's on using the plugin and the reports it can generate.

Thanks a ton to Level Level for this awesome new logo, I really like it.

Google Analytics for WordPress get’s a logo is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

What’s new with this Google Analytics plugin?

Asynchronous tracking

First of all, this new version 4.0 switches to the new asynchronous tracking method. This new tracking was also the reason it took a while to get this version out the door: there were quite a few bugs to work out; tracking by the beta was not reliable for a while.

What’s the advantage of the new tracking you ask? Why bother switching? Well, there are three reasons, as listed by the Google Analytics blog:

• Faster load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution of the tracking code.
• Enhanced data collection & accuracy.
• Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn't fully loaded.

If you want to know more about asynchronous scripts, check out this blog post by Steve Souders, in which he explains the concept and what it means for page load times. The short version: a normal script blocks other objects on your page, like images, from being loaded until it has been fully loaded. An asynchronous script allows for those other objects to be downloaded at the same time.

Custom Variables

Google launched the custom variable support in October 2009, and I’ve been playing with ways to use these in tracking ever since. Custom variables are a way to add data about the current page, the current session or the current user in your tracking, which you can use for some very cool things.

I've been thinking and working with guys like my buddies Frederick Townes and Justin Cutroni about what you should and could be tracking. It wasn't easy, which is why I’m very proud to show you this settings panel:

Google Analytics Custom Variables

As you can see in the screenshot, you can segment by:

• Logged in users: speaks for itself, very useful on BuddyPress sites etc: where do people that are logged in go, where do others go. It stores the users primary user level in the variable, so you can even segment for just "subscribers". (There's an advanced option to ignore users of certain levels should you want to btw)
• Author name: track page views per author.
• Single category: if your posts are in only one category each, this allows you to track views per category.
• All categories: track multiple categories per post, a bit harder to view in Analytics, but could still be useful.
• Tags: track all tags for each post, has its limits but might be useful.
• Publication year: see what’s doing good and bad, more specifically whether your old posts are still getting traffic.
• Post type: especially with the new custom post type features in WordPress 3.0 this is very useful: if you’ve got movies, actors etc. set up as custom post types, this allows you to track how many page views each post type got.

So you could run reports showing which authors do better, which categories and / or post types get more pageviews and so on. This will provide you with the kind of analysis you need to improve your blog. I hope you’re starting to get why I’m so excited about this release. But wait, there’s more.

Google Analytics API integration

Where in the past I'd ask you to enter your "UA ID" from the backend, you can now simply click a button, authenticate with Google Analytics, select the right account and then the right profile and start tracking! Check out how easy that is:

Google Analytics Configuration

Of course you can still enter the UA ID by hand if you want to, just check the box in the lower left of the screenshot and you'll get an input box to enter the UA ID.

E-Commerce integration

This plugin now fully integrates with both WP E-Commerce and Shopp: for both of these plugins it tracks sales using e-commerce tracking, allowing you to track where people that bought something came from, how they went about your site and which pages triggered them to buy.

All you have to do is install the plugin, and it'll automatically detect whether you're running one of these two plugins. You'll then get a box like this:

WP e-commerce analytics integration

Event tracking

In the past this plugin used page views to track downloads and outbound clicks, thereby inflating page views. I started doing this before event tracking even existed, but of course this needed to be changed. The plugin now uses event tracking for this by default, but, if you want to, you can just check a box and it’ll switch to using page views again. You can also switch to page views just for downloads, to keep your goals working the same way.

An API for this plugin

This plugin adds a couple of filters so you can add your own tracking from your own plugins without having to hassle with the rest of the tracking. The 3 filters are:

$push = apply_filters('yoast-ga-custom-vars',$push, $customvarslot);
$push = apply_filters('yoast-ga-push-before-pageview',$push);
$push = apply_filters('yoast-ga-push-after-pageview',$push);

Custom variables are hard to deal with, as they need to be in the same "slot" all the time, that's why the $customvarslot is passed along.

Go get the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin

I have to believe that I've convinced you by now, so please go get the plugin. Please do let me know in the comments when you've upgraded, and what you think I should be adding!

Google Analytics for WordPress reaches version 4 is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

But today, I can tell you that we've got something new, and better. Tracking rankings is hard, especially because Google isn't too fond of people scraping their search results. Because of that, running daily rankings was a pain, but the data we all secretly wanted was in there, we've all known it for ages: visitor data, combined with rankings, day for day, week for week.

Let me show you what I wanted, all this time:

This isn't some mockup, this is real stuff. A rankings tracker called SEO Rank Monitor, that uses the Google Analytics API to combine rankings data with visitor data, showing you what the difference really is between position 1 and position 2. It's also the fastest rankings tracker I've ever seen, ranking a few dozen keywords for me in a few minutes, and then on a daily basis after that, giving some awesome ranking charts:

It also allows you to add your competitors, so you can easily track their goings on your keywords as well. Now all experienced SEO's know they should work on keyword groups more than they should work on single keywords, and thus this new ranking tool allows you to tag your keywords, easily allowing you to check rankings for the group:

As you can see it also allows you to export the keywords to a CSV file. There's more: tracking the number of backlinks to your domain according to the search engines you selected, the number of indexed pages etc. Also, because this isn't a rank tracker that runs on your own machine, it's not clogging up resources and you can check your rankings from everywhere you want.

The tool is paid, of course, but you can try it for free for a month. The normal pricing is $39 a month for the Pro package and $19 a month for the Basic package. With the Pro package you can track 2,500 keywords and 10 domains, with the Basic package you're limited to 1 domain and 100 keywords. In other words: the Pro package is well worth the money. Now there's something even better: I've negotiated a discount code with which you'll get $10 a month off, for as long as you decide to keep your subscription! The discount code should be easy to remember: "yoast" is all you need.

So go check it out, and should you decide to sign up, don't forget to use the discount code "yoast"!

Rankings that make sense is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

There's two reasons for the updates: the first is security, there is an XSS hole (mentioned here) in the latest version of my plugin, which is fixed by this newest update, so please, do update.

The second reason is a lot more fun: I'm going to be adding support for the new asynchronous tracking. It's going to be optional, of course, which makes it a bit of work to implement, so please give me some time. You can expect an update in about a week for version 1, but as this is a new form of tracking, I can't guarantee the new form will be entirely working, there might be bugs in there, etc.

So, thanks for using my Google Analytics plugin, and please share all your thoughts about it in the comments!

Google Analytics plugin updates is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Beneath you will find more info the updated Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and a guide on setting up zero result search tracking on your blog, but first we'll go in depth with the marketing and usability perspective of tracking those failed searches.

Identity vs. brand perception

Every website owner can explain in a few sentences why the website is online and why people should visit it.. this is the identity of your website. Each visitor has his own perception of your website (mostly based on, advertisement, design and tone of voice). This is the brand perception.

Within a perfect world the perception your visitors have of your brand and your identity would be a perfect match. Of course this isn't the case for most websites (unless you work for Coca Cola, Google or Apple, and even then). Due to the huge diversity of visitors almost all website are facing the challenge of providing visitors with the correct information to persuade them to take the desired action (buy, read on, interact, subscribe).

In our experience, most website aren't always successful in achieving this harmony of brand and brand perception… But how can you determine whether this is the case on your site? Look at your landing pages with high bounce rates. Visitors leave because they are not interested in your offer or expected something different when they clicked on the link to your website. And, of course, check out on-site search, it's a very valuable metric to look at:

How can internal search tracking help you improve your website?

Going back to the example of the landing page with a high bounce rate, we only know people are leaving the website and can only guess as to what they were looking for. Tracking your visitors searches will give you far more insight in what your visitors are really looking for but can't find.

By combining the (internal) search keywords, possible e-commerce data and the top content of your website you get some basic insight in the most popular content/products of your website. But this (as Justin Cutroni points out in his blog post) isn't including searches visitors made on your site that have zero results.

What does a zero result search mean?

If a visitors performs a search on you website and isn't getting any results it's likely he will keep searching… But there's a big chance this next search will be done on one of your competitors websites. A search query with no results can have quite a few different meanings, all of them useful information to help you improve your website, the most common ones are:

1. Brand Identity Issues
   The visitor has the perception that he can find a certain piece of information on your website but shouldn't have been on your website in the first place (a discrepancy between your identity and the brand perception of your visitor).

   Chances are you are attracting the wrong kind of visitors (or in the wrong stage of a buying process if your are trying to sell stuff). Taking a look at the traffic source in order to determine if you're ranking on the proper keywords or target the right terms with your CPC campaign (maybe you can save some bucks). The referral pages are worth looking at, maybe visitors performing this type of search just didn't look at the right pages which would help them in their quest for information.

2. Keyword Choices
   The words used by the visitor when searching for something are completely different that the vocabulary used on the website. For example: Your visitor searches for "VAT" but the website only contains a section about "goods and services tax".

   This situation is a great chance to improve your website. You will be presented with a list of quickly fixable "issue": keywords used by your visitors which are not present on your website at the moment. Including search terms which resulted in zero search results within related post/pages will make sure people can find what they are looking for (even if it's in their own words) and can make a huge impact on the user-friendliness and the effectiveness of your website (whether you are trying to sell stuff or just get your content read). Looking back at the identity and brand perception matching tone of voice and vocabulary with your visitors could prove a step in the right direction to get more loyal visitors.

3. The Internal Search Engine is Inadequate
   The search engine used on the website can not find content that should have been showing up in the search results, even when you're sure it's there. While this might not be as quick a fix, internal search is, as you will understand by now, hugely important. So you should solve the issues with the search engine and save valuable visitors.

Of course there are many more useful way's of looking at the data (think of the data visualization option of Google Analytics). Justin also points out two interesting way's of looking at it.

How to implement the Zero result search with the Google Analytics plugin for WordPress

Most of the steps Justin describes are covered within the updated Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. After installing or updating the plugin and configuring according to your needs, you're almost done. The tracking is done by default, you only need to perform the actions in step 3 of Justin's post, configuring the Site Search settings correctly within Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Site Search Settings

Configure your Site Search Tracking exactly like the following video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

After this you should be able to track your zero result searches. Do let us know in the comments if this is working for you and what it has helped you find!

So, if you're still here, go and update or install your Google Analytics for WordPress plugin! If you're a Magento user: stay tuned for the Magento extension that implements this same kind of tracking for Magento!

Huge thanks to my colleague Roel Willems for writing the first and awesome draft for this post! If you need help interpreting your Google Analytics results, or in setting up this tracking, you know where to find us!

Searching Without Result is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Google's new technology

Since a while Google is testing a new AJAX version of their search engine. I'm not sure who's seeing the AJAX version and who isn't, but in Holland most of the Firefox users do see it. You can see if you're one the new one by looking at the url of a result page:

The great thing about this new version is that it makes Google Analytics capable of tracking the clicked position. Yes you heard what I say: the position. Where the 'old' Google only allowed us to track the page a keyword was on, the new Google allows us to track the exact position.

The new filters

You can use the first 2 filters mentioned in the old article, be before you do that: create a new profile where you can apply these filters to (tip: watch the video where Joost explains this all):

Filter name: "Ranking 1"
Filter type: "Custom filter - Include"
Filter field: "Campaign Medium"
Filter pattern: "organic"

Filter name: "Ranking 2"
Filter type: "Custom filter - Include"
Filter field: "Campaign Source"
Filter pattern: "google"

And this is the new filter that is capable of tracking positions:

And the copy/paste version:

Filter name: "Ranking 3"
Filter type: "Custom filter - Advanced"
Field A -> Extract A: "Campaign term", "(.*)"
Field B -> Extract B: "Referral", "(\?|&)cd=([^&]*)"
Output To -> User Defined: "$A1 (position: $B2)"

The new reports

If you have implemented everything correct you should see this in the "Visitors -> User Defined" report:

A list of keywords with the position the keyword was on when a visitor clicked it. Now you're able to see the exact positions, more precise than any ranking tool that is out there. There's 1 minor drawback: business listings next to the little maps are counted as a position also:

The blue result is counted as the 11th result, and not as the first organic result. But when you're analyzing your positions you can easily separate the geo-related keywords from the rest.

Sitelinks

Very interesting: the sitelinks positions are also tracked, and in a more intelligent way than the maps results. If you click on a sitelink, the actual position of that sitelink is passed on. For example, this sitelink has position 4:

If you want to get better insights about your sitelinks you should create an extra profile with the first 3 filters mentioned above. Then add this extra filter to only track those keywords where people clicked on the (full or oneline) sitelinks:

Filter name: "Ranking 5"
Filter type: "Custom filter - Include"
Filter field: "Referral"
Filter pattern: "oi=(oneline_sitelinks|smap)"

The positions you will see are pure sitelinks positions, and you will get an idea about which sitelink is popular and which isn't.

Extra tip

While we are dissecting the referring url from the Google Search engine we could take a look at the "meta" parameter (my dutch blogpost about this). It's used when people use one of these options:

The selected country or language is in the "meta" parameter (not applicable for Google.com) and can be made visible with the following filter:

Filter name: "Language / Country"
Filter type: "Custom filter - Advanced"
Field A -> Extract A: "Referral", "(?|&)meta=([^&]*)"
Output To -> User Defined: "$A2"

And remember: do this on a new profile so you don't mess up existing profiles. The selected language(s) or country is visible in the "Visitors -> User Defined" report.

I had this filter for quite a while on a lot of Dutch sites and saw that the three options where used like this:

1. The internet: 96,69%
2. Pages in Dutch: 3,28%
3. Pages from Holland: 0,03%

Well, that was the update, hope you liked it.

Track SEO rankings and Sitelinks with Google Analytics II is a post by André Scholten on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

1. Live coverage SES Amsterdam - SearchCowboys
2. SES Amsterdam: The Changing Face of Search - SearchCowboys
3. SES Amsterdam - Google Analytics for your SEM campaign - SearchCowboys
4. SES Amsterdam - Beyond Googling
5. Live verslag Search Engine Strategies Amsterdam - MarketingFacts NL
6. Verslag SES Amsterdam (deel 1: de markt & het veranderende landschap) - MarketingFacts NL
7. Verslag SES Amsterdam (deel 2: Google’s visie, OMD & IAB Taskforce Search) - MarketingFacts NL
8. Verslag SES Amsterdam (deel 3: Linkbuilding en Beyond Google) - MarketingFacts NL
9. Live verslag vanaf SES Amsterdam - Tribal Internet Marketing NL
10. Verslag SES Amsterdam - Bijgespijkerd NL
11. SESAmsterdam: een beeld op de Nederlandse markt - DutchCowboys NL
12. SES Amsterdam: De 'Google-view' - DutchCowboys NL
13. De Nederlandse Search Markt - M4N NL
14. Google Analytics voor optimale SEM - M4N NL
15. Verslag SES Amsterdam - Webanalisten NL

Coverage of SES Amsterdam is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• An overview of keywords during a specific period and (after clicking) the landings page on which visitors landed after clicking on the Google result.
• An overview of the ‘Entrance Keywords’ of a specific page.

I wanted more and figured the SEO filter from André would give me the information I needed. The filter linked webpages to the Google result page (where 0 is the first page, 10 the second page, etc). A very nice filer, but I wanted more!

The reports I have made will give you the following information:

• An overview of all the keywords and the Google rank over a certain period.
• An overview of a given specific keyword and the page Google rank during a certain period.
• An overview of the pages, found by Google, for a specific keyword and the Google rank during a certain period.

Click on the images for a better view.

The screenshots in this article are taken from the Google Analytics account of Top Kinderboek, a Dutch e-commerce bookstore with books for children.

Now how did I get all these beautiful reports?
Follow these steps and you’ll get them! But be prepared: start by making a new profile.

Step 1: Make a new profile

Step 2: Make a filter that only includes organic traffic in the profile

Step 3: Make a filter that only includes Google traffic in the profile

Step 4: Make a filter that gives every Referrer a ‘start’ value (parameter)

The ‘start’ value tells us on which page in Google the link to your website was clicked by the person who searched. The first result page in Google doesn’t contain a ‘start’ value. So I use a filter to connect a ‘start’ value to each Referer. This way each Referer contains a ‘start’ value and some Referers contain several start values. For those Referers Google will grab the first start value in the next filter (see Step 5).

Step 5: Add Andre’s custom made SEO filter to your profile

Step 6: Wait for data…

Congratulations! You have now set up your profile. This profile contains only organic traffic from Google and fills the ‘User Defined’ value with the ‘start’ value.

Your profile is ready to go; time for segmentation!

One of the beautiful things about Google Analytics is the possibility to make segments. You can compare different segments over a specified time period. Unfortunately it’s only possible to compare a maximum of three segments at the same time and Analytics adds the ‘all visits’ segment to your report when you want to compare two or three segments. It is however possible to make some nice reports. Using the User Defined value (see Step 5) I made two segments:

Segment 1: The search result is on the first result page in Google
Segment 2: The search result is on the second page or further in Google

This is how I made those segments
Click on ‘Advanced Segments’ in ‘Settings’ and click on ‘+ create new custom segment’. Here you can make your own segments. In the following images you can see how you set up these two segments.
Segment 1: The search result is on the first result page in Google

Segment 2: The search result is on the second page or further in Google

Congratulations! You now have two segments. Now you can make a segment for each Google result page. This gives you more detailed information about the position of your keywords in Google.

See your segments in the Google Analytics reports
You now have the perfect profile with two segments. It’s time to make the segments visible in the reports. Click on ‘Advanced Segments’ as shown in the following image.

When you add the segments to the standard reports then you’ll get a good overview of the SEO performance of your site during a specific period. I’ve show some examples of these reports at the beginning of this article but there are far more to explore!

Using these segments will give you a better insight into the value of SEO for your website. For Zoek Kinderboek the link on the first result page in Google is far more valuable than all other result pages. The difference between the amount of traffic from page one (and the difference in bounce rate and time on site) compared to all the other result pages is enormous. These reports can have additional value when combined with the regular SEO reports that rank keywords. These new reports give a good overview of your presence in Google´s results, how much traffic (and sales) this presence generates and what the behavior is of the people who searches.

Good luck with making these segments and I´d be happy to hear about your experience and to receive your feedback.

Update 9 February 2009
In my reports the User Defined Value is often '(not set)'. The second segment will include this traffic. I don't know why the User Defined Value can be '(not set)'. Does anyone know? Google refers to 'anonymous users segment results' (in the User Guide). But, for the time being, I'll change the second segment, so the User Defined Value (not set), will not be a part of the second segment. But... how? The segmentation filter does not return any values:

New SEO reports for Google Analytics is a post by Reinout Wolfert on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Well I'm here to make it easier for you people. Paste the code that Google gave you into the textarea below, and click this button: get account id

Now Google Analytics team, if you're reading this, this isn't hard, here's the code, feel free to use it:

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">

function get_UA() {

	txt = document.getElementById('scripttag').value;

	var matches = txt.match(/(UA-[\d-]+)/);

	if (matches[1]) {

		alert(matches[1]);

	}

}

</script>

<textarea name="script" cols="40" id="scripttag" rows="10"></textarea>

<button onclick="javascript:get_UA();">get account id</button>[/code]

That's a whole lot easier than telling people how to extract their UA code, isn't it?
Easily get your Google Analytics account ID is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
]]>
			http://yoast.com/easily-google-analytics-account-id/feed/
		19
	
	
		
		
		http://yoast.com/twitter-analytics/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=twitter-analytics
		http://yoast.com/twitter-analytics/#comments
		Sun, 18 Jan 2009 23:01:51 +0000
		Joost de Valk
				
		
		
		

		http://yoast.com/?p=1334
		Twitter is great for traffic, but just how great it is, well, you'll never really know. Why not? You'll ask. Well, the only traffic you'll see coming from Twitter is traffic that comes through Twitters web interface. And most people I know don't use the web interface, they use desktop and / or phone clients. [...]
The analytics issue with Twitter is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
]]>
			%MINIFYHTML1547869a5e1d444ec0fa1e4a227683911%%MINIFYHTML1547869a5e1d444ec0fa1e4a227683912%
Twitter is great for traffic, but just how great it is, well, you'll never really know. Why not? You'll ask. Well, the only traffic you'll see coming from Twitter is traffic that comes through Twitters web interface. And most people I know don't use the web interface, they use desktop and / or phone clients. Because these clients aren't browsers, they won't pass along a referrer, and thus register as "direct traffic".
I won't even try to estimate what percentage of Twitter usage goes through the API, although I've heard people say it's up to 80 or even 90%, although Twitter Stats seems to report it as around 50%, and Twitstat.com as 60%. So you're getting a lot of clicks that look like "direct traffic" in your Analytics, but are in fact, not direct traffic. These people will behave differently than normal people who come to your site directly.
In an effort to improve the reliability of my Google Analytics stats a bit, I've decided to start adding Google Analytics campaign, medium and source variables to all my own tweets in which I promote my own posts. I know from cli.gs, the URL shortening service I tend to use, that my tweeted links get up to 300 clicks each, and I'd love to track the behavior of those people on my site.
So I've made a small "in between" script that I can use in a bookmarklet. What it does is simple: 

it grabs the URL and title from the request
it adds the UTM variables ?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter
it does a request to cli.gs through its API to create a shorturl
it then redirects to twitter.com/home with the status set to that shorturl

Download the script here, and then modify this bookmarklet to use it:
javascript:(function()%7B%20window.open(&#x27;http://www.example.com/clig.php?url=&#x27;+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+&#x27;&amp;utm&amp;title=&#x27;+encodeURIComponent(document.title));%20%7D)();
Set example.com to the domain name and path where you uploaded it.
This should allow you to create shorturls with the campaign tags in it, and thus track those tweeted links in your own analytics!
The analytics issue with Twitter is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
]]> http://yoast.com/twitter-analytics/feed/ 71  http://yoast.com/rankings-filter-analytics-video/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rankings-filter-analytics-video http://yoast.com/rankings-filter-analytics-video/#comments Sun, 18 Jan 2009 07:06:01 +0000 Joost de Valk  http://yoast.com/?p=1332 Because André's excellent post raised a couple of questions, I decided to do a video on how to implement the rankings filter. It explains how to do the first and second filter André mentioned in his post, I've added a third filter to lowercase the campaign term, and the final filter is André's awesome add [...]
A Rankings Filter in Analytics: the video is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
]]> Because André's excellent post raised a couple of questions, I decided to do a video on how to implement the rankings filter. It explains how to do the first and second filter André mentioned in his post, I've added a third filter to lowercase the campaign term, and the final filter is André's awesome add ranking to keyword filter. Check out the video, and if you have any other questions, please ask them in the comments:
<embed
src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2863628" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" height="300"></embed>
By the way: the explanation was done on the account for the site top kinderboek. This is a site we work on at OrangeValley, you can buy children's books there, and all the profit from it goes to charity!
The code to copy paste for the fourth filter:
Field A, campaign term:
(.*)
Field B, referral:
(?|&amp;)(start|b|first)=([^&amp;]*)
Output, user defined:
$A1 (page: $B3)
A Rankings Filter in Analytics: the video is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
]]> http://yoast.com/rankings-filter-analytics-video/feed/ 23   A Rankings Filter in Analytics: the video • Yoast Because André's excellent post raised a couple of questions, I decided to do a video on how to implement the rankings filter. It explains how to do the first and second filter André mentioned in his post, I've added a third filter to lowercase the campaign term, and the final filter is André's aw  Analytics,Google Analytics   http://yoast.com/track-seo-rankings-google-analytics/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=track-seo-rankings-google-analytics http://yoast.com/track-seo-rankings-google-analytics/#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:17:19 +0000 André Scholten     http://yoast.com/?p=1319 Some months ago I created a Google Analytics filter that enables you to track your Google rankings. On my own Google Analytics blog I blogged about it and saw there was more interest in it then usual. Joost walked by and offered me to do a guest post on this subject. So here he goes: [...]
Track SEO rankings with Google Analytics is a post by André Scholten on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
]]> Some months ago I created a Google Analytics filter that enables you to track your Google rankings. On my own Google Analytics blog I blogged about it and saw there was more interest in it then usual. Joost walked by and offered me to do a guest post on this subject. So here he goes:
Track SEO rankings?
Well, you can't specifically track the exact position of the keyword that was clicked like you can do with AdWords. But it is possible to determine the page he was on. A ranking tool can tell you over and over again that a certain keyword is around position 15 in Google while Google Analytics claims he is on page 1 (position 1 to 10). This effect can come from 'personalized search' or 'local results' that can influence the Google rankings dramatically. People see other results than you see with your ranking tools. And therefore you need Google Analytics to do the real ranking.
Setup the filter
To get the rankings in your Google Analytics reports you have to create a new filter:
The title of the filter contains a 3, that's because filter 1 and 2 take care of filtering out everything else than Google Organic traffic. So yes: you also have to create a new profile to apply these filters on to be sure you don't screw up your main profile.
This filter only works for Google. if you want it to work for Yahoo and Live Search also, make sure you change the filters 1 and 2 so they accept Organic from all three of them. Then setup the filter like this:
The ranking results
After a while the "User Defined" report will look like this (ignore the language):
What you see are not the actual rankings, but the number of the first result of the page the keyword was on. So when you see 20, it means the keyword was on the third page, and a 50 means the sixth page. (Yahoo and Live Search will report 21 and 51 in stead of 20 and 50).
When you don't see a number but only "(page: ): it means the keyword was on the first page. So  perhaps it is better to change "page:" to "minimal position;", I leave that up to you.
If you want to filter the list of keywords on  keywords with at least a page 2 position you can use "(page: d{2,3})" in the filter field below the list. The d stands for digits, and the 2,3 for the amount of digits you're looking for.
Enjoy.
Track SEO rankings with Google Analytics is a post by André Scholten on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
]]> http://yoast.com/track-seo-rankings-google-analytics/feed/ 202   2010 SEMMY Runner-Up   analytics google ranking    analytics ranking    rankings example    http://yoast.com/measuring-seo-rankings/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=measuring-seo-rankings http://yoast.com/measuring-seo-rankings/#comments Wed, 10 Sep 2008 10:57:31 +0000 Eduard Blacquière   http://yoast.com/?p=965 While Joost is enjoying his well deserved honeymoon, he asked me to do a post as guest blogger. "As long as it's anything about search", he said. Alright, that's not so hard :) I thought I'd dive into the discussion of search engine rankings and what the value is in SEO. To match the style [...]
Measuring SEO: why rankings are worthless is a post by Eduard Blacquière on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
]]> While Joost is enjoying his well deserved honeymoon, he asked me to do a post as guest blogger. "As long as it's anything about search", he said. Alright, that's not so hard :) I thought I'd dive into the discussion of search engine rankings and what the value is in SEO. To match the style of Joost, let's take a fear standpoint: Why rankings are worthless.
Do we need to worry about rankings?
Over the years the discussion about the value of search engine rankings when determing the succes of SEO comes back now and then. Last month Google gave us another reason to discuss the value of rankings, while blocking the automated rank checking software tool Web Position from retrieving search engine listings from Google.
This has led some people, including myself, to ask themselves again what the value of rankings is. Historically search engine rankings are a key metric to measure your SEO succes. But do we need to continue tracking and reporting them? Do we need to make ourselves and, more important, our clients worry about rankings? I think we should not.
Search engines blocking rank checkers
One reason to not worry about search engine rankings (anymore) is the fact that search engines start to block rank checkers which are often used to track and report rankings. Webposition was the first victim (it seems to be working again, but for how long?) and it's not impossible - I even think it's realistic - to think that Google, or other search engines, will block more automated rank checkers which sent out hundreds or even thousands of queries per day to search engines.
I'm not sure why Google would want to block tools like Webposition, besides that it's against their guidelines (they even mention Webposition there). The argument they give - that it costs to much server power - doesn't sound convincing to me. Maybe it's because Google just wants human searcher behavior on their search engine so they can adjust their algorithm to humans and not to automated search activity by rank checkers. I also think that personalization of search results plays a role here.
When personalization kicks in
Another reason for which I think we should not worry about rankings is the personalization of the search results. Based on a growing amount of personal data search engines are showing a different set of search results to different searchers more and more. Last year Google has said several times that personalization is one of the most important things the search engine is focussing on at the moment. And they do.
Take for example iGoogle (one of the fastest growing products of Google) which collects tons of personal data. And don't forget the widely spread Google Toolbar which started collecting personal website visits alongside your search behavior. And what could they learn from Google Analytics, Google AdSense, Google Chrome and many other Google services? As you can image, Google has a lot of data to personalize their search results. And that's what they're doing.
What's the (future) value of rankings?
That said, what's the (future) value of rankings? Search engines blocking rank checker software tools is the least hardest problem to solve. Creative minds will find a way to track rankings anyway. But what about personalization? That's a different story.
It's very hard, even nearly impossible, to find a way to optimize your content for search engines while search results are getting personalized more and more. That's because you just don't (and won't) know the personal data Google has collected.
When rankings could be of value
I think there are rare situations where rankings could be of value though. That depends on the goals you want to achieve. I think most websites should start their SEO goals with traffic from search engines. But imagine yourself some major brands who already have a strong awareness in their market. For those companies their visibility in the search results on category or product related searches can be of value. But bacause of personalization maybe you shouldn't track positions but for example you could track if you're listed in the first 5 or second 5 listings or something like that. Of course most websites aren't major brands so for most websites rankings tell you nothing in terms of measuring SEO.
What should we worry about?
These two reasons only give me enough reason not to worry about search engine rankings. But what should we worry about then? I think you can measure the succes of SEO in a lot of ways, but let's mention some metrics which I think are most important. These are just some basic metrics, but they give a much better insight in your SEO succes than search engine rankings do (feel free of course to add your thoughts about measuring SEO succes in the comments!).
Growth of search engine traffic
Growth of search engine traffic per keyword
Growth of conversions from search engine traffic
Growth of conversions from search engine traffic per keyword
1. Growth of search engine traffic
One basic metric which is easy to measure (and which means a lot more than rankings) is the growth of overall traffic you receive from search engines (of course that's from natural search results and not the sponsored listings). Before you start with SEO, measure the amount of traffic from search engines and make this your benchmark. Start your SEO activities and measure the growth in search engine traffic on a regular basis. This gives you a basic insight into the results of your SEO activities, but it tells you more than measuring search engine rankings.
2. Growth of search engine traffic per keyword
An easy addition to this metric is to measure the growth in traffic from search engines for specific keywords. Most of the time SEO is based on optimizing your web pages for specific keywords. Therefore the measurement of growth in traffic from search engines for these specific keywords gives you a good indication of the succes of your SEO efforts. Of course don't forget to make a benchmark of the amount of traffic you receive from search engines per keyword before you start doing SEO.
Together with this metric you should also measure which page the traffic from search engines for the specific keywords lands on. Of course that should be the pages which you've optimized for those keywords. But especially with the more generic keywords and/or pages with similar content it's interesting to see which page search engines will pick to rank and thus sending you traffic.
3. Growth of conversions from search engine traffic
Every web site has one or more goals which you want your website visitors to complete. You should measure your web site in depth to know if your website visitors convert from random visitors to prospects or even clients, depending on your goals.
When measuring the succes of SEO you should measure this conversion of traffic you generate with search engines. It doesn't matter where your site ranks in the search results. It doesn't matter how much traffic a search engine sends you. But it does matter which quality of traffic a search engine brings you. And a great way to measure the quality of your web site traffic is to measure how well it converts according to your goals. Of course as with every metric, start with a benchmark and look at the growth.
4. Growth of conversions from search engine traffic per keyword
You knew this metric was coming. To get an even better insight in the succes of your SEO efforts you can measure the growth in conversions per keyword from search engine traffic. This tells you if the keywords for which you've optimized your web pages brings you quality traffic. If not, maybe there's something with the conversion process or usability of your site. Or maybe you're even targeting the wrong keyword. You wouldn't have a clue about this if you were just measuring rankings to determine the succes of SEO.
Quality of traffic
These 4 basic metrics give you a much more better insight into the succes of your SEO effort than search engine rankings do. But you could even go further with determing the quality of the search engine traffic you generate. Take one of the 4 mentioned metrics and take a look at the bounce rate, the time on site and the amount of retruning visitors. These metrics don't tell you much individually, but look at the trends over time.
Does the bounce rate of a web page decrease after you've optimized it for a specific keyword? Then that's a signal the searcher finds what he's looking for. Is your bounce rate increasing over time while doing SEO? Then you might be targeting the wrong keyword for that specific page.
No absolute metrics
These metrics which say something about the quality of the traffic aren't solid laws which can be applied to every web page. Sometimes a high time on site is a good signal, for example with a blog which writes long articles. But when the time on site is high on an ecommerce website, it could be a signal visitors can't find what they're looking for. The same goes with metrics like bounce rate and returning visitors.
So please take into account much more than the metric itself. What does the web page look like? What's the goal of the web page? How much content is on the page? And what sort of content? Ask yourself these and more questions when interpretating metrics like bounce rate, time on site and returning visitors.
Web analytics needed
I think it won't surprise you that a web analytics package is needed to measure the metrics mentioned above. The choice of the specific package depends on your goals, demands and experience with web analytics. But the metrics mentioned above can all be tracked with free web analytics packages like Google Analytics, Yahoo Index Tools or Microsoft adCenter Analytics. Are you using a blog or website based on WordPress? Go download the WordPress plugins Joost created to easily implement Google Analytics or adCenter Analytics in your blog or website.
Conclusion
So why bother about search engine rankings when measuring the succes of your SEO efforts? Are rankings reliable with search engines personalizing search results more and more every day? I think we shouldn't worry about rankings, but what should we worry about?
Go beyond rankings and measure basic metrics like the growth of traffic generated from the organic search listings. Segment that traffic per keyword and go measure the conversions, preferrable per keyword. And get even a greater insight about the quality of this search engine traffic with metrics like bounce rate, time on site and returning visitors. But interpretate those metrics with care and take in account much more information besides the metrics.
That should give you a good insight into the results you achieve while doing SEO. And this insight goes far beyond the information you retrieve from measuring search engine rankings. Because what's the value of a search engine ranking without receiving quality traffic that converts? Such a ranking is worthless.
Measuring SEO: why rankings are worthless is a post by Eduard Blacquière on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
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