Even before you hire an SEO to do some work on your website, you really need to know what you’re getting for your hard earned money.

The great thing about SEO is that nearly all of it is trackable.  Every website visitor leaves a nice trail when they come by, and over time you can collect that data and sort through it for patterns, good or bad.  Then, armed with that data, you can make changes that increase the amount of clickthroughs, or even move things around on your page to help influence a higher purchase rate.

However, none of this is possible if you aren’t collecting the data.

Google analytics is arguably one of the best (and free) analytics collection programs on the market today.  Setting it up for your website is a breeze, just sign up and add the code they provide you to each page of your website.

This will do a couple of nice things for you, even before you hire an SEO to start spiffing up your site.

You’ll set a baseline of visitors

You have to know what is already going on on your website before you hire an SEO.  Knowing your baseline of visitors over a week or month will show you the impact of the things you have already done to promote your website.  If it shows an average of 20 visitors a week, then you know that if it increases to 30 and then 40, that your SEO is actually doing things for you.

You can track landing pages

If you’re really not into SEO, or not into marketing at all, chances are you are promoting your home page URL as the place to go.  But what happens if your page on custom widgets is getting tons of traffic, and you had no idea?  You may already have a great web page that doesn’t have a good call to action, and you don’t even know it!

You can see which search engine is referring traffic

Not sure if your visitors are coming from Yahoo!, MSN or Google?  A good analytics program will tell you where your strong points are, helping your SEO focus on boosting those rankings and growing the others into a mature state as well.

You can see geo-information about your visitors

What if you’re a blue widget maker who only sells in Missouri?  And what if 85% of your visitors are living in Washington?  It doesn’t do you much good if you only sell to Missourians.  Know where your current traffic is coming from, and adjust accordingly.

Summary

I know this post is a bit down-n-dirty, but I hope I’ve made the idea clear.  Go get signed up for Google Analytics today.  Get it set up on your account, and then start looking for a good SEO company to help you improve your baseline.

Because of the overwhelming response to the upcoming SEO seminar, I’m announcing a second FREE seminar:

There comes a time in most businesses when they see their traffic start to plateau.  They’ve optimized pretty well and are bringing in some nice traffic, but they don’t seem to see the increase in traffic that they’ve seen in months past.  If your website has plateaued, maybe it’s time to go back to some of the basics and see if there are some ’smaller things’ you can do to bump up your visits yet again.  Here are some ideas:

Headline Tags

You’d be surprised how many websites don’t employ the H1 tag.  Yes, it is definitely important.  It’s right up there with the page title in importance.  Why aren’t you using these?

Sub Headline Tags

If you’ve got pages that include several portions, they need to be broken up with H2 and H3 tags.  This will help the search bots understand the ’sections’ of your page, and will improve your overall page score.

Photos

Ok photos aren’t going to help you out a lot in the search engine rankings, but it has been shown that readers prefer a picture that illustrates the point of the content.  Plus, you can add the ALT tags, which will give you yet another opportunity to put in a keyword or so.

Change your Underscores to Hyphens

I’ve talked about the underscore issue before on my St. Louis SEO blog.  It still seems to be the accepted way to make the most friendly URLs.

Use Robots.txt to Disallow Duplicate Content (Wordpress)

Wordpress is an amazing tool.  It interlinks everything together so nicely, and people can find your content in any number of ways.  Problem is, all these links going everywhere have different URLs, and this can cause your own site to be penalized for duplicate content.  Good news though – there’s a fix.  Modify your robots.txt file to disallow these paths.  It won’t hurt your rankings; in fact it’ll help you.

Sculpt Internal Links with NoFollow

Since we’re in the process of making our site more search engine friendly, lets take a few minutes to add some rel=”nofollow” attributes to some of the pages on your site.

NoFollow my own pages? Are you serious?  Yep.  These pages would include login pages, legal disclosures, terms of service and contact forms.  No sense in letting those pages have any of your ‘link juice’.

Meta Descriptions

Another one I’ve discussed in the past.  I’m surprised by how many web designers will ask you for your meta keywords but not put in a description for each page.  I’ve personally seen this simple change/addition bring in a nice jump in traffic.

Summary

These changes are worth your time.  If you’ve hit somewhat of a wall and are looking for things that will help you start climbing again, check them out.

With that said, don’t put a ton of time into these all at once, especially if you have a big site.  Take one or two of them and start optimizing every page on your site.  Write shortcut code where necessary that can help you identify them faster.

Keep adding new content and building links as usual – don’t stop doing the main things just to do these.  Consider them dessert items that you’d like to have from time to time.

Title: Marketing Your Business Website -February 18, 2009
Cost: FREE (limited seating)
Location: Arnold Missouri, just south of Saint Louis

Do you wonder why your website isn’t listed on Yahoo! or other search engines? Are you clueless about search marketing techniques that can draw customers to your site? The free seminar on November 19th is a one-time event that will cover topics such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), online advertising tips and avenues, along with ways to increase your website traffic along with other offline marketing ideas.

Time: 6:00PM to 8:30PM (please, no late arrivals)

Suggested prerequisites include: a business website (currently or planned), knowledge of basic HTML, and a basic understanding of internet searching. Basic mouse and keyboard skills are required along with a basic familiarity with the operation of a Windows computer.

Registration is required to attend. Call (636-296-5171) or visit the Arnold Missouri Branch of the Jefferson County Library to sign up today. After signing up, contact us for a FREE Website Analysis Report!

This free class will be taught by volunteer Saint Louis SEO Will Hanke, owner of Arnold-based Lighthouse Technologies which provides businesses with website services including design and marketing.