A small diversion from the technical side and into the black art of SEO.
For those of you who don’t know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is an art and science of getting a web page ranked extremely high, number one or number two, in organic (non-paid) search results.
How do they do that? Well, there are a number of things, like making sure that the title of your web pages contains the keywords that you think people will be searching for to find you, that those keywords are at certain locations within the pages of your site, and any number of other things that can really help bring your website up to the top of search rankings. Does it work? Sure - it can work very well. By using some very basic SEO techniques we’ve driven our sites up to the top of search results. Granted, sometimes the keywords used are sort of funny (try googling for “determining differentiators” - the result of that is based on correct SEO techniques applied to a site, but honestly I was surprised that happened for that posting).
What does that have to do with website monitoring?
A couple of things actually. SEO companies recommend monitoring your website in order to make sure that the work done to improve its ranking in search results is actually working. But they aren’t talking about the kind of monitoring that we do here at microNOC.
Rather, they are talking about monitoring the hits on your site, where they came from, what pages they looked at and what path visitors take through your site. What that is really called is website analytics.
They are absolutely right that you should be monitoring analytics. It really helps you to know that your site is doing what you want it to do, or (and this is sometimes more important) that it’s not doing what you want it to do.
There are some very good, free, Analytics applications out there. The most commonly used by far is Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics) which only requires the addition of a small bit of code that they supply located somewhere on each webpage. Once you have that in place, you can login to the Google Analytics site, and check up on various things like how your visitors got to your site (direct, referred from another site, search results, etc), how long they were on the site, what pages they looked at, and a ton of other features that include adwords and sales tracking. Overall it’s a great free service.
But it’s not website monitoring the way that we define it. Any SEO worth their salt will also recommend that you have a service in place to make sure that your website is up and running. Because if it’s not, then there was no point in getting your site up high in search ranking if people try to get to it only to find they can’t.
Hope everyone stays up and running today.
