Thanks to all of you who made it to our Meetup. We had a great discussion and presented a lot of information on Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.
Google/SEO:
Think of links as votes of credibility for your site. As time as gone by, Google has tweaked it’s algorithm to also affirm the quality of links. This credibility is also known as “authority”, or sometimes commonly called “link juice” (as shown in some of the slides below). The measure of the quality of links coming into your site is a big part of what helps you to rank well.
Google doesn’t search the internet, they copy websites and index it them their servers. Your site WILL NOT show up on Google if you don’t allow your site to be indexed. It’s not magical — you launch a website and not every page will be indexed instantly. More and more pages on your site will be indexed over time.
Think in terms of SEO. Better content is better for search engine optimization. The rules aren’t changing… they are being enforced. Understand that you will experience SEO Lag if you are just starting to optimize your website. The benefits of SEO are built over time.
Google Analytics:
After signing up for GA (here), you’ll need to install a code on your website. We recommend the Google Analytics plugin by Yoast, but many themes have a GA code field built in as well.
Inside Google Analytics, you can choose a date range to customize how much data you view at once. You can also compare dates, like this month to last, or this month to the same time last year.
You can also build a Custom Dashboard (download ours!) so that the information you use the most is available at a glance.
Customize the Keywords in Google Analytics to filter out your brand.
HitTail.com was recommended to get around the “not provided” keywords. Keywords in the “not provided” column now account for most of your traffic. HitTail will automatically import your Google keywords on a daily or weekly basis, giving you full access to this critical marketing data. *This is a paid service, and as we’re not using it, we are brand agnostic here.
Google Webmaster Tools:
Login to GWT here and confirm your site.
Set up a sitemap. We recommend WordPress SEO by Yoast. This is your opportunity to help Google by showing them what to index.
Make sure you have canonical URLs.
So, now why do you need GWT? If Google sees a problem with your site, they will post a message to your GWT account. If you didn’t have an account, you’d miss out on notifications of malware on your site, issues with crawling, etc.
Next month, join us for our Meet Up on October 16th on Backing up, updating and restoring your WordPress website.
Below are slides from Mickey’s presentation:
