Search Engine success and how to measure it.

Website owners must make sure that they are measuring their search engine success. Once you can measure how successful you are, you can start to improve your website so that it becomes even more successful.

Here are four things you need to measure to know how successful your website is:

Track your search engine referrals
One of the easiest ways to measure the success of your website is to track the search engine referrals. The three main search engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing, with most traffic coming from Google. If you do this, you will learn more about how much traffic each search engine generates, the cause of drops in traffic and sales, and which SEO tactics are most effective.

Track the visits from certain search engine terms and phrases
You should also track the keywords you use, as keywords send traffic to your website and some may be more effective than others. This means you can streamline your keywords so that you only use the ones that generate the most traffic to your website. Tracking your keywords will also help you to predict and identify new effective keywords, ensuring that your website remains relevant.

Track the number of pages receiving one or more visits
If you want to improve your search engine ranking, you must track the number of pages on your website that receive one or more visits. This information will help you to understand more about how search engines index your website. A search engine may not have all your pages in its index, especially if you do not use tags effectively. Once you know which pages are successful, you can streamline your website to help increase traffic.

This will also help to make you aware of issues with site architecture, quality of content and link acquisition. As you improve your site, you will notice that the pages with one or more visits are increasing, which indicates that your website is more useful and interesting.

Track the share of visits
It is also important to track the share of visits, including referral traffic, search traffic and direct navigation. Direct navigation is typed-in traffic, such as someone typing in your website address. Search traffic is from search engines, such as when someone searches for ‘home ware in Leeds’ when your website sells home ware in Leeds. Referral traffic is people who came to your site through links they found online or in their emails.

Tracking this information will help you to learn more about where your audience is coming from, which in turn will help you to tailor your advertising campaigns so that you can increase the traffic to your website.