How to Measure your sites success

Introduction

This is an introduction to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and web site promotion. It is intended to give an overview of the techniques involved. The items here are the main areas, but not all of those that may require attention to tune a web site to achieve good results. Once a site is tuned you will still need ongoing adjustments, content and monitoring. Even then a site will take at least 3 months to start to grow from these methods.

Major indicators
These are the dials on the dashboard so to speak, easy to find information that you can gather before you start any SEO campaign. They give you your starting point and by checking them regularly you can see the effectiveness of your work. They can also be used to monitor how well the competition is doing and to see how you compare.

Google page rank
This is one of the easiest to find out but one of the hardest to influence. This is a simple 1 to 10 score, with 10 being the best, that Google uses to rate your web site. This affects how you're spidered, where your results rank and is a major indicator of the success of a web site.

Google cache and spidering
Google keep a copy of all pages and by viewing the copies of your site pages you can find out some interesting information. When did Google last index your page and put information in its results? How many pages did it spider - if any? And how do the pages look - if they are wrong then you need to fix your site NOW!

Alexa and the Alexa rating
The Alexa information is a great benchmark and stores data for years, so for any of the information it supplies you can look at growth (hopefully) for the last 2 years or more. Millions of people around the world have the Alexa tool bar and it monitors their web usage and patterns. From this, it gives a wealth of useful information to help both surfers and the webmasters/ programmers. The rating is similar to the Google Page rank system, with 1 being the highest and going down to 5,000,000+

Alexa reach
Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com. Alexa expresses reach as number of users per million.

Alexa page views
Page views measure the number of pages viewed by Alexa Tool bar users. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the users visiting the site. The page view rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on the total number of page views (not page views per user).

Competitors figures
Alexa and to a lesser extent Google, let you view all of their information about any site, so check out your competitors - see how your site rates in comparison . The tool bar also shows similar site, sites which surfers also visited and sites which link to your site.

Links
Link popularity check is one of the best ways to quantifiably and independently measure your web sites online awareness and overall visibility. Simply put, link popularity refers to the total number of links or "votes" that a search engine has found for your web site.

Search engine saturation
Search Engine Saturation simply refers to the number of pages a given search engine has in its index for your web site domain. Not all search engines report this information, but enough of them do to create some meaningful benchmarks for your search engine marketing campaigns.

Symptoms / Remedies
These are some of the major problems which will effect a site and its ability to generate traffic. They all combine but not evenly, so you could have all but one of them spot on, however, the one thing missing could cripple the site - conversely you can have all of them 90% right and nothing works, it is still a matter of trial and error but this gives a good framework to start working on.