The Daily Feed Issue #25: Tracking early stage SEO

Welcome to Issue #25 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more. If you have questions about SEO, SEM or getting traffic, please post them to 503me.com (it's free).

We're tracking our early SEO performance since we launched 503me.com on Thursday and I thought I'd share a few of the ways we measure SEO performance of an early stage website and how you can begin to measure your performance too.

Firstly we're looking at how many pages have been indexed. Doing a Google search for site:example.com will show you how many pages have been indexed for your site. So far we have 56 pages indexed as you can see from this search. Not a spectacular amount of content, but it's all high quality so it should start sending us a few visitors in the near future. 

Next we are checking our server logs to see how frequently Googlebot is visiting our site. Right now we're getting a few pages crawled every 3 to 5 hours. Unfortunately you can't use Google Analytics or Feedjit Pro to get this information. You're going to have to look at your server logs. Javascript based tracking or analytics services can't give you this data.

Next I want to find a page that we have on our site and see where it's ranking in the results for a particular search. That will be our benchmark search. Someone posted a question asking "Is the meta keywords tag still important?". If I do a Google search for that phrase without using quotes, I find that we're appearing on page 3 of the results. We are currently ranking at about 230. Not too good, but the site is only 4 days old, so that's OK for now.

This benchmark search is now my measure of how we're doing in terms of pagerank with Google. As more sites link to 503me.com, we'll see that search results rising from 230 to 150, 100 and eventually, with a bit more work, page one of the search results for that search.

PS: On Saturday we added the ability to comment answers that are posted and it's great to see a number of comment threads kicking off as original posters strike up a conversation with someone who answered their question.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO

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