In this section, we will start looking
at metrics that you can use to diagnose specific SEO issues. An example of
this would be finding out whether a major section of your site is not
indexed. Another example is seeing how your traffic growth compares to
that of your competitors (this helps you decide whether you have set the
right objectives for your efforts).1. Search Engine and Competitive Metrics
Numerous tools allow you to monitor your site and those of your
competitors, providing insight into your SEO progress. You can also use
these tools to figure out what your competitors are doing from an SEO
perspective. This type of intelligence can provide you with new ideas on
how to adapt your strategy to get better results.
As with all such tools, it is always important to understand the
context of the tools and to have an idea as to what you are looking for.
Better knowledge of your competitors’ strategy is certainly one valuable
goal. Detecting a problem in how your website is crawled is
another.
By selecting specific and actionable goals, you can set yourself
up for the highest possible return.
2. Site Indexing Data
It is valuable to know how many pages in your site are in a search
engine’s index. This is interesting for two reasons:
To determine whether important parts of your site are not in
the index. If key parts of the site are not in the index, you can
embark on an effort to determine why.
To learn about your competitors’ sites and strategies.
You can get basic information on the number of indexed pages for a
site using the site:yourdomain.com
command in Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. Figure 1 uses the results for Dennis
Mortensen’s blog.
As shown in Figure 1, Google
reports 566 pages in the index. Is that all of his pages? Many site
owners will have a pretty good idea of the number of pages on their site
and therefore can get a gut feeling as to whether they have a problem.
One important thing to note is that the results that site: commands return are not that accurate.
You can use them to give you a gut-feel sense, but that is all.
You can improve this data by performing your site query and then
appending "&start=990&filter=0" to the end of
the Google SERP URL. This will give you more accurate totals for the
number of pages indexed.
If you think many pages are missing from the index, you can begin
to explore a bit deeper. You can start by narrowing down sections of the
site. Figure 2 shows the
2007 blog post archives on Dennis’s site.
As shown in Figure 2,
this reports 87 pages in the Google index. By using these different
command structures, you can isolate what portions of the site appear to
be less well indexed than others. You can also combine the site: command with other operators. For example,
consider combining it with the inurl
operator, as in Figure 3.
Figure 9-16 shows that
there are 8,840 pages of the xbox360 subdomain on the http://www.1up.com website in the index.
So far, we’ve shown website indexing tools that you can use on any
website, which is great for competitive research. However, you can pull
more accurate statistics for your website using Bing Webmaster Tools. You can also
pull site indexing data from Google Webmaster
Tools (Google WMT), but this tool is limited to reporting
against pages that appear in your Sitemaps file.
Both of these tools are very useful, and you should consider using
them on every site you touch. The tools provide lots of valuable data,
at no cost, and with little effort to boot. For example, Figure 4 shows the opening screen for Bing
Webmaster Tools (Bing WMT) for Stonetemple.com.
As per Figure 4, it looks like Bing
has 2,570 pages from the site indexed. If you enter the site:stonetemple.com command in Bing itself,
it shows something rather different (see Figure 5).
This search shows 11,800 indexed pages. Of the two, you should
consider the report from Bing Webmaster Tools to have more accurate data
than the results from a site search at Bing.
