I know it’s something I don’t pay enough attention to – my numbers.
I have SlimStat set up on my blog and occasionally tap into it to see whether my blog is trending up and what posts are more effective.
I have Google Webmaster which I rarely visit yet I should because it provides a terrific set of data to analyse what’s happening on your blog and where it can be improved.
Online sites that give you a quick analysis of your blog are also useful. One I looked at today gave me a Keyword Analysis of my site. The results were way different to what I was expecting. By analysing a couple of more successful sites I was able to see the difference in how they used their keywords to rank better. Changes underway!
What I learned from that exercise is that no matter what keywords you put in your meta fields, your alt tags, or your seo plugins, what counts is how you use your keywords in your content. I have not focused on writing content with my keywords front and centre. I’ll be looking to change that.
If you’re a blogger and you only focus on writing content to get it out of your head, that’s only part of the way to enabling people to find you in the search engines.
Free online tools useful for site analysis
- http://www.copyscape.com/ – always check your site to ensure you are using original content AND that others are not scraping your content
- http://ubersuggest.org/ – handy tool to identify keywords and long tails extensions although no search volume data
- http://www.siteliner.com/ – gives a good analysis of your site and identifies broken links, duplicate content and comparisons with average user data
- http://www.woorank.com/ – another very good site analysis tool
Here’s one issue I found. I have a new blog that’s just over a week old. In building it I’ve been commenting on other blogs and using the home page as the link. Turns out I should be mixing that up to build links to my inner pages too. http://blog.woorank.com/2013/03/how-to-build-links-to-your-inner-pages/
So when was the last time you looked at your stats and the effectiveness of your site SEO?