SEO lesson one: Monitor Google.

In their rush to raise their site's search engine rankings, everyone gets carried away with SEO techniques. While having a strong search engine position can be a great advantage in getting visitors to a website, it is not the end all and be all of website's raison d'etre. The purpose of any website is to provide information or to sell a product or service - i.e. to elicit a positive response from visitors. SEO rankings are only helpful in determining that the website has the correct number of backlinks and a healthy ratio of keywords, but there are other more relevant ways to measure a site's success at pulling people in and transforming page visits to sales. These are known as Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. Many online webmaster tools such as the Google site monitor and the Google web monitor have help webmasters measure their site's KPIs:

1. The Number of Unique Visitors
This indicates how many unique visitors a site has. This measurement in important because it tells the webmaster if their site's page titles and META description TAGS are attracting the target audience. Unique visitors often stumble upon a site through keywords they search for.

2. Total Number of Visitors
This measures the number of times anyone has visited a site, whether they are returning visitors or first time unique visitors. A site's total number of visitors suggests a relationship between certain keywords and the amount of visits, which hints at the site's relevancy among a specific audience sector. Sites that get a large number of return visitors are regarded as a resource with an archive of articles that are constantly accessed. Such sites are called "thought leaders" and the trick is to convert these return visitors to buyers of a particular product or service (a call to action). Studies show that the average person visits a site three times before responding to a call to action, like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter etc. To keep people returning to a site it is necessary to constantly update the site with fresh, relevant and compelling content.

3. Average Number of Page Views
As the name suggests, this measures the average number of pages a visitor has viewed during their trip to a site. A high number of page views could mean that the visitor had trouble in pinpointing the content he or she was looking for and had to click around and do a bit of searching - or for gallery sites it could mean that they simply liked the photos and pictures and kept returning to look at them.

4. Conversions
Conversions are the most important KPI measurement. This is where the average viewer of a site is converted to a person who actually responds to a call to action and becomes a doer. This can range in anything from signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, downloading a piece of software or anything else that turns a passive visitor into an active member.

Taking all the KPIs into consideration the website owner can get an overview of the effectiveness and performance of their site. If the strategy of using highly ranked keywords to drive visitors doing Google searches to a particular page and performing a specified, measurable action works then the site can be said to be effective at what it sets out to do. While it takes a lot of work to design a SEO site and achieve a high search ranking, it is only half the battle. The real challenge lies in converting visitors into buyers.

As stated earlier, the internet provides a wealth of tools to help webmasters and marketers model their site's KPIs. The best of these is Google Analytics, which are a bunch of free tools that helps Google monitor a variety of site statistics and help improve their KPIs.

The Google Monitor Tool.

If you want to monitor Google but you don't have the time or resources to do that manually then let me tell you that there is a solution for your problem visit the link below for more information:

The Google Monitor Tool.