SEO & Google Analytics: Assess Your Current Impact

As I've mentioned previously in my blog, "Define Your Audience," one of the first steps in optimizing your site is to determine who you want to attract.  However, you also need to know who your site is currently attracting and where it stands currently in the search engines. Only after this assessment can you adjust or modify your site's design accordingly. A powerful tool for this assessment is Google Analytics. As pointed out by Eric Lander in his article, Google Analytics only measures user data.  Therefore, you would have to view your web site's log files to get a complete report of visibility and navigation through your site.  However, if you are interested user metrics such as page visits, bounce rates, time on site (these topics will be discussed in laters posts), then Google Analytics is a great tool for getting started.

Navigating through Google Analytics and interpreting the data reports can be pretty confusing for beginners.  Therefore, as part of my search engine optimization series, I'm going to be including some posts on how to interpret various parts of the reports provided by Google Analytics. More...