When the main work is finished, you have built your site and optimized the pages for your targeted keywords, submitted your site to various Web directories, you should review your progress and make improvements which are necessary. The critical stage in your SEO campaign is to monitor your progress with different online reporting tools: they should track keyword positioning, site statistics and other criteria to better level of your sites, make it strong and dismiss weak properties.
Also it is important to understand that the job of a search engine optimization consultant is not done after the code revisions are made. It can take several months before one site achieves its projected goals. And after achieving those goals you must monitor different statistics and indicators to stay on the top.
Keyword Position Reporting
Search engine optimization and keyword position reporting always go the near ways. Position report or keyword ranking is one of the first tasks done before beginning search engine optimization and vice versa when the search engine optimization is completed the last task done is the same kind of reporting. The reporting does not end there! Search engines are constantly changing their search engine algorithms to bring back "more relevant" results. Search engines also locate new sites and new pages that might be considered as relevant or more relevant for your targeted keywords or phrases. Therefore, a search engine optimization consultant must constantly watch these changes in the search engine results and re-optimize based on the new metrics.
Pages Indexed Reporting
An important criterion in optimizing your site for search engines is to make certain that your pages are "search engine friendly". The first and most accurate tool is the search engine itself. To find out which pages from your site are included in the search engine, one can go directly to the search engine of choice and type a simple command.
Search Engines:
Google: http://www.google.com/
AlltheWeb (FastSearch): http://www.alltheweb.com/
AltaVista: http://www.altavista.com/
MSN Search: http://search.msn.com/advanced.asp
Google explains it in the following way:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
In other words, PageRank is scored from a scale of 0-10. PageRank plays a large factor in determining which sites rank highest for competitive keywords.
Back Link Reporting
Back links or links you have coming in to your site from external site is another fundamental metric to track in your SEO package. Back Links are important for two reasons, (1) the more links you have coming in to your site, the more traffic you have and (2) the more back links you have coming into your site, the more search engines consider your site important (i.e. PageRank).
Back links have obvious benefits, but how does one measure the number of backlinks? Below are the various search engines and syntaxes to determine back links.
Google: http://www.google.com/
AlltheWeb (FastSearch): http://www.alltheweb.com/
AltaVista: http://www.altavista.com/
General Server and Site Statistics Reporting
There are hundreds of Web site statistics and analytics software available to choose from. They all provide the basic functions of tracking visitors or traffic, pages visited, referrer sites, keyword phrases and browser/computer types. Most Web site statistics software comes with a way to monitor search engine driven traffic and the keywords or keyword phrases used to find your Web pages. By monitoring the amount of traffic delivered by specific keywords one can adjust his or her strategy to include more relevant keywords. Referrers or referring sites statistics is an excellent way to find out which sites your traffic is coming from. Normally the top referrer is "no referrer", which means that the traffic is coming from people who enter in your URL into the browser's address bar. Directly under that you will find sites where your referring traffic is coming from. For many sites the second referrer will be from Google. You can track and see which search engines and sites are bringing in the most traffic.
Monitoring pages visited helps determine which pages are most popular and which just stand in the shadows. Many search engine optimizers try to drive traffic to specific internal pages and not just the homepage. The purpose of driving traffic to a specific page is two fold. The first reason is that it is best to optimize pages for unique keywords by spreading out the targeted keywords over several pages.
The last report, which really does not have much to do with SEO, is the browser and computer type report. This is generally important to keep track of when testing your site. Now that Netscape announced that it would no longer be releasing newer versions of its browser and Microsoft announced that is will not longer release Apple Internet Explorer browsers, the number of browser types have declined. It is however important to see what your current users are viewing your site in.
How to impress your visitor?