Comments on: WordPress SEO Reader Questions Answered: How Web Analytics Fits in with SEO

By: Persona Creative

Persona Creative — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 10:39:41 +0000

Good article – people must use Google Analytics coupled with Webmaster Tools to further their optimisation efforts.

On the topic of WordPress SEO, if you haven’t already installed this plugin then I suggest you get the all in one SEO plugin for WordPress:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

By: Michael Martine, Blog Consultant

Michael Martine, Blog Consultant — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:50:11 +0000

@Derek – Thanks for sharing your story. It teaches an important lesson for everyone. I wouldn’t suggest deleting the entire robots file. You want one that does the right things, not the wrong things. SEO-Nomicon will explain how to do this with a simple plugin that requires no coding.

By: Donny Gamble

Donny Gamble — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:48:12 +0000

I think the best way to improve your analytics and SEO is to provide your visitors with quality informative content that they can use and learn from. I think this is the best SEO strategy of all.

By: Michael Martine, Blog Consultant

Michael Martine, Blog Consultant — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:48:01 +0000

@Franklin – New bloggers invariably go through a phase where they can’t stop looking at their stats. It’s an important learning time, actually. Any more, I look at my stats every couple weeks or less, for about 20 minutes.

By: Franklin Bishop

Franklin Bishop — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:21:27 +0000

Some people get too obsessed with it though. That is usually the problem. You are wasting your time looking at the stuff. Now if you look at it 15 minutes every day then it isn’t so bad.

By: Derek

Derek — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 16:25:02 +0000

Let me share a quick personal story about the importance of analytics and more broadly, webmaster tools.

On one of my much larger blogs, I was having a ton of problems with getting search traffic. After stressing endlessly over why, I used Google’s Webmaster Tools (a free service for webmasters). It said I had thousands of pages excluded by my robots.txt file.

So, I deleted it. My traffic shot up from 10,000 uniques per day to over 20,000 uniques per day in less than 2 weeks.

Mind you, people won’t experience this kind of growth, but the bottom line is… if I didn’t use analytics, I would have never fixed it.

After deleting my robots.txt file

By: Michael Martine, Blog Consultant

Michael Martine, Blog Consultant — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 15:34:16 +0000

@Hummerbie – Great point, yes utilizing analytics is not WordPress-specific, but the application of this information has to be translated into specific actions within a blog or website platform. Since there’s very little out there about this specifically for WordPress (and yet the number of WordPress bloggers is huge), I felt there was a strong need for step by step training on WordPress SEO. My training course is called SEO-Nomicon, and it will be available on the 7th at 4pm Eastern time.

By: Hummerbie

Hummerbie — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 14:08:07 +0000

I am always amazed by what terms people get to my blog and website.
It is really nice to see you covering this aspect of finding target keywords and how to analyse the results.

Although it is af course not only for WordPress SEO, but a must for any website that wants to ranked higher in Google.