How to Monitor Your Website Performance

In this lesson you will learn about how your site is doing!

What am I talking? With all the online marketing, you need to know how you are doing and whether your efforts are paying off! It's always nice to see some sort of return for all your hard efforts.

To start with, you will need to establish some sort of baseline. From this baseline you can reassess at a later date and see where you are and whether your marketing efforts are paying off. There are some measuring criteria with which websites are assessed to see how they are doing in terms of popularity and how they are ranking against the other websites out there.

The first thing you need to do is to basically decide what your business model is and how you are going to define success. This will vary from business to business. You may see your efforts as being successful if you are listed by the search engines. Or you may wish to get X number of visitors to your website each month, or you may define your success by the number of sales you get through your online activities. So, before you start, have an idea of how you are gauging your success online, you may even have a number of criteria to measure against.

1) Google PageRank

Google's PageRank is used as a popular measure of your websites popularity. It is often described in terms of a voting system and is scored from 0-10 (10 being highest ranked). Google places a lot emphasis on links to your site. Basically, if you see each website on the Internet as a 'person'. Each person can vote for another person, much like an election! The more people who vote for you, the higher the Google PageRank you can achieve.

Unfortunately, it is not as simple as that. Each casting vote has a weighting, the more important the 'person' the more weight they have behind their vote. So, if you have a politician vote for you, their vote will have much more 'weight' than if just any Joe Blogg voted for you. Translated, this means that the more 'important' the website that links to you, the more likely that is going to help your ranking.

Another aspect that aids your ranking is content. In addition to the factors mentioned, Google has sophisticated algorithms that assess your webpage content. It can scan your page and know what it is about. If your site is of poor quality, it will not rank well.

Also important is relevancy. If a website that links to you is relevant to your website (on the same theme/industry), then it will help your ranking more than a website that links to you from a non-similar theme/industry.

This link is to Google information page that tells you about its PageRank technology, http://www.google.com/technology/.

It is important to realize that no-one really knows the exact factors that help you gain a high PageRank. However, with testing and experimentation, marketers have discovered strategies that seem to work well.

So, in summary, get lots of good links to your website from other high quality and relevant websites. Find some sites you like and that have good content and fire off a personal email to the webmaster requesting a link, they may agree if you offer to link to their website from yours. This is called reciprocal linking. Reciprocal linking tend not to be as useful as single one-way links to your website alone.

You can check your website PageRank using this free tool: http://www.checkpagerank.com/.

2) Alexa Traffic Ranking

Alexa is another one of the tools that is used by many to assess how their website is ranking. Click here to see the Alexa Tool and enter your domain to get the traffic ranking.

The lower the number, the better the ranking. Alexa looks at your number of 'pageviews' and the 'reach' of your website. It calculates this via its toolbar which is installed on millions of browsers.

Regular checking of this tool over a period of months will hopefully show how your marketing efforts are paying off in terms of better traffic ranking.

To learn more about this useful tool, go to their website at: http://www.alexa.com/site/help/traffic_learn_more

3) Search Engine Listing

One of the most important starting points with having an online business or a website is to get listed on the search engines. If you have a website but it is not indexed by the search engines, then users will not be able to find your site.

So, how do you go about doing this? Well, once you have your site up, you can submit the URL of your website directly to the search engines. However, there is a general consensus that it is an inefficient method to getting listed. If you decide that you want to submit your website to the search engines anyway, then you can do so through the links below to the main search engines.

http://www.google.com/addurl/ (Google URL Submit)

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit (Yahoo URL Submit)

http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD (MSN URL Submit)

The best way is to be found by the search engines is via links from other sources that point to your website. That means, being found via links that are placed in directories, articles, blogs etc. Links placed on these sites can enable a search engine spider to find your site quicker and to get your website indexed.

To see whether your website has been indexed is to enter your website domain name into the search engine search box. If you look at the screenshot below, I have typed in one of my website URL's and it appears in the Google results. This shows that the website is indexed. The job now is to promote it over time and get it ranked higher (the best way is to generate great content on a regular basis and lots of one-way links).

Once your site is indexed, you can then work on improving its ranking over a period of time. Understand that it can take some time to get indexed but not always. By creating links to your website, you can get listed faster.

4) Keyword Positioning

This is where in the search engines does your website appear for your targeted keyword. Use the free tool below.

http://tools.seobook.com/general/advanced-rank-checker/index.php

Simply enter your keywords and your domain name and you can see if you are listed within the Top 1000 sites for that keyword!

4) Website Traffic

This can be a good indicator of how your website is doing. Usually it is a measure of how many visitors your website gets per day or per month.

The way to determine this is via your website statistics package that your website hosting should have. Usually you log into your control panel and you should be able to find your website statistics and visitors information there.

If for some reason, you don't have access to any website statistics, then you can add some statistics to your website using this free application from http://www.statcounter.com/.

The number of visitors you get to your site is a good indicator of how your website is doing. At the end of the day, if your website has no visitors, then you will get no leads or sales! Traffic is the life-blood of any online business.

Just a quick note, there is a difference between 'hits' and 'visitors'. 'Hits' is the number of times your website/webpage is viewed. A single person who looks at 3 different pages on your website will count as 3 hits. With 'visitors', this is the number of unique visitors that go to your site. So, if that same person looked at 3 different pages of your website, it will only count as 1 visitor. Visits or more accurately, unique visits is the benchmark you should be using here.

5) Sales/Leads

This is probably the best indicator of how your website is doing. The number of leads or sales you make through your website (this only applies if your site is aimed at bringing in sales and leads).

At the end of the day it is results that count and nothing but results.

You need to set yourself a goal of how many sales or leads you want to generate from your website and over what period of time. Once you know this, then you have a target to aim for with your online marketing activities. You can tailor your work to achieve your goal.

By the way, traffic does not necessarily mean sales. You can have a website that has thousands of visitors, but unless those visitors are looking for what you are selling, then you will get zero sales. You need targeted traffic, that is why keyword research is so important! 

Final Note

People often think that they can simply place a website online and submit their site to the search engines and get lots of visitors. It does not work that way! Marketing online can often take a long time and should be seen as a long-term project. Sure, there are ways to bring in faster results and this includes using Google Adwords, but this method costs and if you are inexperienced it can cost you dear.

One thing that can take time is getting your website ranked well and generating a good steady traffic stream. You are talking 6-12 months plus! So, use the tools above to find your baseline for your website, then review it after a couple of months and more, and you will gradually see changes.

As an example, I personally developed a back pain website that was purely content driven and was written by myself. After 7-8 months nothing really happened and it brought in an income of about $12/month with no Google PageRank. I ended up selling it as I got frustrated. 6 months later, it started generating about $80/month and had gained a Google PageRank of 2 and no further work had been done on the site by the new owner! So, the moral of this story is patience!

TASK

1) Check your website ranking, using:

    Google PageRank
Alexa traffic Ranking

2) Establish a baseline using the Google PageRank, Alexa ranking, website traffic etc.

3) Decide what you goal is for your website, whether it is generating X number of visitors per month, generating X number of sales, achieving a certain Google PageRank etc, decide some sort of goal and then you will have something to work towards.

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