Search engine or site engineering optimization has been a hot topic for years, and considering the continuing growth and success of e-commerce, it’s likely to get even hotter. Since Google has such a dominant position in the search industry, focusing your SEO efforts around their recommendations is the smart thing to do. Google provides a ton of top-quality resources to help you understand exactly how they rank sites and how to improve your site’s listings. As usual, all the tools and methods described in this post are free!
The first step when it comes to SEO is signing up for a Google webmaster tools account so you can get some insight into what search terms your site is showing up for, how many impressions (times your listing shows up on a page of Google results a user views), and clicks (actual visits to your site) are being generated on Google. Before you even think of spending money on an advertising campaign, you owe it to yourself to do a little market research and find out what people are searching for, what they’re interested enough in to click on, and what your top keywords and search terms are. Webmaster tools will help with all of this. Setup is a very straightforward process of uploading a single HTML file to the root directory of your server.
Webmaster tools may seem a little boring, after all search terms, keywords, and click through rates may not be the most exciting topic, however this is fundamental information about your site’s relevance to the customer that you simply can’t ignore. Webmaster tools is also your portal for controlling and updating your site’s visibility and sitemap. If you don’t already have an XML sitemap available you can head over to XML-Sitemaps.com to have one generated for free. Upload to the root of your web server as you did with the verification HTML file, submit it in webmaster tools, and you can rest assured that all of your webpages will start showing up in search results. Last but not least, setup an RSS reader or subscribe to updates from the official Webmaster Tools blog, or subscribe to the YouTube channel if you’re more the visual learner type.
The next major phase in optimizing your site is to setup a Google analytics account. Another free signup that only requires a Google email account or that you register your email with Google. Setup on analytics can be a little more involved, since you need to embed the tracking code that Google provides during signup on every page you want tracking enabled for. Ideally this script will be embedded in the footer for your site so that the rest of the page will all render out as visible for a user before the script is executed. Putting the code anywhere should work, but it could slow down your perceived page load times.
Google analytics is truly an incredible tool: you can get information on everything from real time reporting on current visitors to your site to how many pages visitors view, how much time they spend on your site, and even what order they enter and leave from. Analytics is all about understanding how users interact with your site, and understanding what potential frustrations they might be having.
With the two basic intelligence components in place you’re ready to start fine-tuning your web presence. Google has a pretty definitive downloadable PDF guide to SEO that I highly recommend reviewing your site against once you have all your setup complete. This will get you through the basics of making certain that your site is as easily visible and intelligible as possible both to your potential visitors and the Google bot. For more in-depth training on SEO and analytics, or to work towards a certification of your knowledge from Google check out the Conversion University.