Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

This strategy is also reflected in the maxim “Don’t throw good money after

bad.” You need to know which of your efforts are bringing you good results so you

can send in the reinforcements, and you need to know which efforts are not working

so you can bail out on them. And the only way to know this is to

track results

Tracking Will Help You Keep Your Job

If you work for yourself, you’re the president of your own company, or you’re reading

this book for a hobby site or your blog, feel free to skip this section. For just about

everyone else, we suspect that someone, somewhere is

paying

you to do this work.

Eventually, that someone is going to wonder whether they have been spending their

money wisely. Even if your boss ignores you every time you walk in the office with a

tracking report, even if your department head refuses to back you up when you try to

get IT support for

conversion tracking

, even if Sales tells you there’s absolutely no way

you can track sales back to the website, trust us; someday someone is going to want

this information—preferably in a bar chart, with pretty colors, and summarized in five

words or less. If you don’t have the information, the measure of your accomplishments

is going to default to this:

Are we #1 on Google?

And, if you’re not, get ready for some repercussions!

Tracking Helps You Stay Up-to-Date

“Do it right the first time.” It’s a great motto and a great goal, but it’s not a realistic

plan for your SEO campaign. For one thing, you will need to continually re-prioritize

your efforts as described in “Drop the Duds.” But there’s also another, unavoidable

reason that your SEO campaign will need to constantly evolve: the search engines are

changing too! Don’t worry, this book sets you up with best practices that should have a

nice long life span (in “Internet years” that is!). But you will inevitably need to be pre-

pared for some changes. What works best today will not be exactly the same as what

works best three years down the road. And the only way to know what has changed is

to track your campaign.

Now that you are convinced that tracking is important, take a look at your list

of conversions. Some of them will be easy to track; some may be difficult or close to

impossible. Later, we’ll take some time to think through possible ways to track your

successes (and failures). Here are the methods that Jason and Elizabeth are considering

for measuring their SEO campaign results:

Jason at Babyfuzzkin says,

“Our primary goal is online sales. Probably the simplest

way to track to our SEO campaign is to compare online sales numbers before and after

the campaign. Our secondary goal is attracting attention from vendors. We’ll track

c01. 7:56 17