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Did your search engine optimization (SEO) work?
By: CHRIS NIELSEN

by Christian Nielsen

To find out the effectiveness of your web site search engine optimization (SEO), there are several things you can do.

The first thing is to use your web traffic reports for a before and after comparison. Most ISPs provide these as part of their hosting packages. If your ISP does not provide reports, they may provide the log files and you can generate the reports yourself.

Create a spreadsheet or document to record some of the key pieces of information. This lets you establish a baseline to show results over a period of several months. A simple spreadsheet gives you the option to create charts that clearly show trends in site traffic.

The most important number is the "unique visitors". This number indicates as closely as possible, the number of people that visited your site. This number may be inflated because visitors from AOL go through proxy servers and unless your web server uses cookies to identify them, each request to the web server appears as a separate visitor. Tracking "hits to home page" is a good number to compare to the "unique visitors", since it is an approximate number of the total visitors, but may be low since not all visitors will hit the home page. Using these two numbers will give you a fairly accurate idea of the "real" number of visitors.

Another number you can track is "total hits to site", but it's value is limited. A hit is only a file request. A file can be a web page, but it can also be a graphic page, WAV file, MP3, or any other file. A page with 4 graphics will result in 5 "hits" for a single visitor

"Top referring sites" are sites that have some kind of link that someone used to visit your site. This is where you will see the name of famous search engines and directories, as well as other sites that link to you. You may find that some of your best traffic comes from a site that is related to yours, or who has given you a prominent listing.

"Top referring URLs" are links to pages that have the link to your site. Use these to see how you are listed on other systems.

"Top search engines" identify the systems that have brought visitors to your site.

"Top search phrases" will show what your visitor searched for that gave them results that included your site. You may discover addition keywords to add to your site.

For the best possible results, by all means re-submit your site to hasten the process! In general you should avoid re-submitting to directories unless you need to try and get your listing changed. For the most part, SEO techniques have no effect on directories.

Using a spreadsheet to analyze traffic will reveal how effective your SEO is working. This may take several months, however. Not all systems re-visit your site on a regular schedule. But even if you do not re-submit your site, you should see increased traffic as the robots and spiders return to find you have more for them to work with. The optimization they find will result in better quality results for those searching for what you offer.

Increased traffic is fine, but the truth is no one really cares about getting more people to visit the site. What everyone REALLY wants is customer conversions, or to have the visitor buy your product or service. If your conversions do not increase, but your traffic does, then you have to look to either the targeting of the site traffic, of the offer that vistors find when they arrive.

Customer conversions is the real sign the your SEO worked as expected.

************************************************************ Christian Nielsen is the owner of Nielsen Technical Services and Senior SEO consultant. The company specializes in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for small and mid-sized business. www.NielsenTech.com
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