“Why SEO” – this is a very basic question that gets asked very often.

The answer is simple: We do search engine optimization to get more unpaid search traffic from various search engines like Google (also known as organic traffic).

In short, better SEO = More traffic from search engines.

Measuring what we want to improve

Since we set out to improve visitor traffic by doing SEO, the first thing that we need to do is to measure the traffic to your blog.

Unless you can measure the traffic, how can you know how effective is your SEO effort?

So, the very first step for you is to find a good traffic analysis tool if you don’t already have one. That way, you would know any change in traffic that happens due to your SEO.

You would also be able to analyze the changes in traffic patterns, and would be able to pinpoint what SEO steps are more effective for your blog or website.

(Wondering what you should look at in Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your SEO?

Please come back to read “What factors to check in your site’s traffic analysis package for better SEO”)

Google Analytics – The best

If you haven’t chosen a traffic analysis / visitor statistic analysis tool, here is what I always recommend: Google Analytics. In fact, you can opt for it even if you are already using some other website traffic analysis tool.

It is a great, absolutely free tool from the Google stable. Anyone, from any country, can register for Google Analytics.

If you have an existing Google account, you can easily register using that as well.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a JavaScript based traffic analysis tool.

When you register your blog or website for Google Analytics, you are given a small JavaScript code snippet that you need to put on all the web pages of your blog or website.

The ideal way to do this is to include the code in the template of the website, so that it automatically gets inserted into all the web pages!

What can be measured?

Google Analytics is a tool that would never stop to amaze you – it is capable of measuring LOTS of things about site traffic.

Here are just a few important matrices that Google Analytics would provide:

• Number of page views
• Number of visits
• Number of unique visitors
• Number of pages per visit
• Bounce rate
• Average time on site
• Percentage of new visits
• Referring sites
• Analysis of sources of traffic to your site
• Top landing pages
• Top content of your blog or website
• Keywords used by people to find your site on search engines

(Don’t worry if you don’t understand some of the terms – we would be discussing them here in the coming weeks)

You can view most of this data for any period you choose – from just one day to a few years! And you can specify exact date ranges for which you want to check the data.

Remember – this is just a fraction of the features available from Google Analytics. You have to try it to get the feel of the power of this tool!

How does Google Analytics look?

Here’s a screenshot of Google Analytics:

Sign up for Google Analytics now!

Signing up for Google Analytics is easy (and free) – don’t delay it!

Here’s the link: http://www.google.com/analytics/ 

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You put in a lot of hard work in

• Choosing the domain name
• Selecting the hosting provider & hosting plan
• Choosing the blogging platform

You also spend hours on

• Selecting the theme
• Setting up various plugins (including SEO plugins)
• Writing blog posts and publishing them (with one keyword per post)

Now what? What is the next step? Do you just keep waiting for Google to come to your blog or website?

How can you get your blog or website indexed by Google real quick? Is there a fast-track process?

Here are the things that you can do to get you blog or website indexed faster by Google.

Get incoming links

Try to get some incoming links from other blogs and websites in your niche. If possible, try to get them from sites that already have some traffic, and have a good page rank (PR).

If the blog you have started is not your first blog, you can easily leverage your existing blog to get some links to the new blog!

For more on getting backlinks, please check out “Where to get backlinks from for good SEO“.

Produce fresh content

To make Google come to your blog, and to keep it coming back frequently, you need to produce fresh content constantly.

Write blog posts regularly, and Google should be at your doorstep sooner rather than later!

Utilize the power of Social Media

Submit some of your good articles to social media sites. These include (but are definitely not limited to):

• Digg
• Stumbleupon
• Delicious
• Mixx
• Technorati

Google constantly indexes these social media websites, and any link back to your blog would be followed very quickly!

If you know some power users for these sites and can get your articles submitted through them, even better! This would mean that:

• Your post gets a presence on the social media site, and Google would find you
• Even more users get exposed to your blog post submission (due to the power user status of the submitter), and you get increased traffic at your blog. And possibly, some backlinks as well!

Use Twitter

It is still unclear if Google would follow & index your links posted in Twitter (due to the “no follow” attribute, but if nothing else, it would drive traffic to your blog and might earn you some back links!

Implement Google AdSense

When you have Google AdSense on your blog, Google needs to know the content of your blog before it can start presenting the context sensitive ads.

What does this mean? It means that Google indexes you blog to find out what it contains!

This may or may not mean immediate inclusion in the Google index, but it surely helps.

Implement Google Site Search

The logic is same as above – to give accurate search results for your blog, Google needs to know its contents. This means that Google quickly indexes you site when you use Site Search!

Related posts:

1. Review of Google Analytics – A great tool to measure effectiveness of your SEO

It is important to have the right keyword density, and it is important to not stuff your post with keywords.

Is there anything more to keywords? Do you need to consider anything else?

Well, yes!

Keyword placement

Its not just the number of times a keyword is used in a post – where you put your keywords plays a role in SEO too.

Where you put the keywords in your blog post or webpage is called keyword placement.

Where should the keywords be?

Search engines like Google give a lot of importance to the beginning and the end of any post.

Therefore, you should definitely have the keywords appear in the first and the last paragraph of your blog post. It would be even better if you can have them appear in the first and the last sentence of the post.

This is the most important keyword placement tip for great SEO.

Apart from this, the blog post can have the keywords naturally scattered throughout the post – of course, making sure that the keyword density is right, and that you don’t stuff keywords in the post.

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You must have heard the word “backlinks” a lot. What are they?

It is a fancy word, but the meaning is simple. The links that you get from other blogs or websites are called Backlinks.

Importance of Backlinks

And why are backlinks so important in your SEO efforts?

Getting indexed

If your blog is new, your first priority is getting indexed by search engines like Google – this needs to happen before any SEO!

When you have links form other blogs or websites, it is like a doorway to your blog for the Google spider (or crawler). When Google indexes these other blogs, its spider would find the link to your blog, would follow it, and then index your blog as well.

So, backlinks provide pathway to your blog for the search engine spiders. Backlinks would help get your blog indexed faster.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Modern search engines give a lot of importance to backlinks – at times, even more than the content of your blog!

This is because Google treats a backlink as a vote of confidence for your blog – another blog or website would link to you only if it finds your content good.

In any contest involving voting, who wins? The one getting the maximum votes!

It is the same with backlinks – more the backlinks, better is the treatment of your blog by Google! This means that your blog would get much higher rankings in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Conclusion

Of all the offsite SEO factors, Google gives the maximum importance to backlinks. Therefore, try to get as many backlinks to your blog as possible – the more, the better.

Your blog would get indexed faster by Google and other search engines, and it would enjoy higher rankings in the SERPs.

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