This is Part 3 of 3 in the Tweaking SEO for WordPress Series
Contrary to what SEO agents, consultants and similar companies would tell you, there are a number of free tools online at your disposable in tweaking the SEO for your site. The good news is such tools are not just built for use with WordPress but every other website or CMS platform you are using. There is no hiding it that SEO is an ongoing affair (similarly with speed optimization) for any website. It does take a little patience and possibly a fair bit of research and reading up to really know what you are doing or need to do. It is however not as intimidating as what these companies would tell you. In fact, it is fun and more often than not, you would learn a thing or 2 in the process.
Before you buy into any services of SEO firms, make sure you have exhausted the list of free tools online below. Unless your main excuse for not doing so is that you haven’t got the time (why are you reading this anyway?) or that you have the money to throw around (then send me some beer money to my PayPal account at the end of this post).
Site Info from Alexa
Having been around for the longest time, Alexa continues to be a good source to understand the basics about traffic related to your site. If you have configured and defined your Site Title and Site Description from the information provided in my earlier posts; either the All in One SEO plugin or DomainTools SEO Text Browser, you should enter it at Alexa – Site Owner Tools too. You need to be registered and logged-in to do that but with Facebook connect, you have no real reason to be grumbling about registering with another site. there are a few Site Widgets you can grab and slap on if you prefer a quick snapshot locally instead of having to visit Alexa. Alternatively, you should install the Alexa Toolbar (or Statusbar is my preference) if you are running Firefox. Either of these provides you with a range of tools direct from your web browser to any site that you are currently viewing. Everything from changes in your Traffic Rank, Reach, Pageviews, Pageviews/User, Bounce %, Time on Site and Search % are presented in numbers. Strictly for SEO purposes, I will focus on the following.
- Traffic Stats > Pageviews/User: provides a quick snapshot of how many page views per user each time someone visits your site. although this is largely attributed to having relevant content on your site, the appropriate use of tags in your blog post together with related posts plugins on your site will most definitely have a positive impact.
Related posts plugins are notorious for slowing down your site by as much as 2 seconds (possibly more). Before you install any of such, consider how long it now takes to load your site. If speed is an issue, consider caching with plugins like W3 Total Cache first. If you decide to proceed with a related posts plugin, you might be interested to know that I am using LinkWithin for all my sites. Apart from being more visual, LinkWithin seems to be very light on resources, something not apparent with similar plugins.
- Search Analytics: provides a quick snapshot of what are the search terms that drive traffic to your site. These may actually have an impact on your related content and tags, keywords and key phrases you use on your site.
- Clickstream: provides a quick snapshot on where your visitor came from (referring sites) and where they exited to most possibly from links within your site. A higher percentage of traffic from search engines like google.com for example is an indication of how well your site is indexed and appearing higher up on related keyword / key phrase search results.
Sitemap:
Know what to look for and where to find them makes searching for stuff easier doesn’t it? well the same goes for bots as with humans. Installing a sitemap on your site can dramatically improve the crawl rates on your sites by search engine bots. These of course will directly impact how frequent your site is being crawled and indexed by the bots. (more…)
