SEO And Analytics

I’ve had a couple meetings with Nick at the SBDC regarding SEO and Analytics for my web site. Here is a brief overview of what I learned.

First Site Guide

Since I’ve written this post, I’ve come across this site that has many tutorial videos and useful information for setting up and running a web site for small businesses. If you have questions or need a quick refresher on web hosting, web design, online marketing, blogging, registrars, service reviews, and more, check them out. If you’re just starting out, it’s also a good place to learn about how to set things up.

Google Analytics

Use this to track your web site traffic. It’s a free tool from Google, and it seems like it is probably about as good as any other solution. There are plenty of other analytical tools, but I’m going to try this out first, since I’m using Google Apps for Work for most of my web services.

Google Tag Manager

This is a new tool from Google that uses a script on your web pages to dynamically generate analytic events, so that you can change tracking info without having to update the actual page source every time. This seems like it could be useful if you had a lot of traffic and wanted to be able to customize your stats on-the-fly to get more specific feedback.

Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools)

This is a tool from Google that connects to your web site and analyzes it for you to recommend improvements and alert you to any issues that Google finds. There are also tools and information about how to optimize Google’s search results and organize the information that is presented to users.

Yoast SEO

This is a WordPress plugin that helps with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It analyzes your posts and rates them. It gives detailed information about the rating along with suggestions to improve the rating. It also allows you to directly modify the meta data in your posts to customize your search result data. Apparently it ties into WordPress SEO data, so there are probably plenty of alternatives to this as well.

Yoast Analytics

This is another WordPress plugin that connects to your Google Analytics account and allows you to access some of the data from the WordPress dashboard. I haven’t used it much yet, so I don’t know if it offers anything over Google Analytics aside from convenience.

I haven’t really used these tools to their full potential, since I still need to generate some content and post some links to my social pages. I’ll be doing this soon, since I’d like to have some experience with these tools before my next meeting with Nick.