Drupal SEO - Statistics and Analysis - Setting yourself up to win - SEO Series - 2

In the first of the Drupal Seo series I went through basic Drupal SEO with no additional modules installed. Now we are going to move onto SEO Statistics and Analysis and how to set yourself up to win, things get a bit more in-depth (not a lot) as you will need to now install a couple of modules and connect up some external services.

In order to know if your getting its right, when SEO'ing Drupal then you have to set yourself up correctly. So that you can monitor whats happening and analyse why, so that you can make sure that Google et al are seeing your site the way you intend.

To start with you need to decide on two things

1) Your Keywords (this is not dealt with in this article, there is loads on the web about doing this), this is the basis of all SEO, get it wrong and you can end up wasting an awful lot of time and money

2) Your KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) are imperative to establish right at the start, you can evolve these as move forward however you have to at least have the basics in place when you start in earnest.

Here as some baseline SEO KPI's that might be useful:

• Keyword to Conversion Ratios
  

• Ranking By Target Keyword
  

• Traffic
  

• Traffic by keyword
  

• Conversions to sale or leads
  

• Duration on visit
  

• Referring Sites
  

• Referring Search engines
  

• PageViews
  

• Geo locations
  

• Bounce Rate
  

• PPC V Natural Traffic
  

• Site errors (404's etc.)
  

You need to tailor these to your own business requirements as they massively change dependant on your site and business requirements.

Basic External tools that you need to use:

• Google Webmaster tools
  

• A must have for analysing the way that Google sees your site and content. Make sure that you do the basics:

  • Verify your site
    

  • Set your geographic target (Google is slow to use this but eventually does)
    

  • Opt into image search unless you have a good reason not too
    

  • If you have the option set your crawl rate to the optimum
    

  • Add the site map
    

  • Verify your robots.txt
    

  • I recommend that you check webmaster tools at least once a week
    

• Google Alerts (very useful for seeing how fast you get indexed)
  

• Add alerts for all your primary keywords

• Keyword Ranking monitoring
  

• There are loads of tools for this I think keyword elite is pretty good

• Google analytics / Awstats / Another web statistics analytics applications
  

• This is a real case of personal preference / commercial situation, whichever you choose you should setup you KPI Targets / Goals in the application so that they are easily track-able.
  

• On page analysis tool e.g. webceo
  

• This will help you to understand what search engines are looking for, however a word of warning don't over use it. Its should only be used for guidance, don't destroy your content to optimise it in a way that webceo says is perfect, remember you want to appeal to users so its more important that its perfect for users than search engines.

• FireFox + add-ons
  

• Don't try to use IE for SEO, you just wasting time and effort

• FireFox add-ons
  

• • yellow pipe
    

  • Gets a spider view of your page, very handy

  • firebug
    

  • Great for analysing pages issues in headers etc.

  • SEO Quake
    

  • Has a great range of useful tools

  • Web Developer
    

  • Too many reasons to count for having this installed

• Xenu
  

• Great link analysis tool for checking your site,Run on a regular basis

Basic Drupal SEO modules you need

• http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap
  

• This automatically creates an xml sitemap for submission and allows you to authenticate your site with the primary search engines. Make sure you review the sitemap that it generates before your submit it, and tailor it to be what you need.

• Choose an Statistics package, current options include, if your starting out for now Google analytics is probably easiest
  

Regular SEO Maintenace Tasks

• Capture your own onsite searchs, so that you know what specific things people were looking for and make sure your optimise for frequently search terms
• Track errors 404's etc. and fix the problems, you should use both your local statistics packaage and google webmaster tools for finding issues
• Add keywords from your analytics package to your keyword list for monitoring, frequently you will find that users are finding you for keywords that you have not optimised for, track these and optimise appropriately

Later in the series we will get into much more indepth analysis of your drupal site and some very detailed statistics.

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