Lesson 11: WordPress SEO, Statistics, and Analysis

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1 Lesson 11: WordPress SEO, Statistics, and Analysis Chapter 1: Introduction Welcome to Lesson 11! We're in the home stretch now. So you've been spending lots of time learning how to build and optimize WordPress websites, but what if you launch your site and nobody visits? And if you do get visitors, how can you know if you're giving them the information they came for? This lesson will answer those questions by showing you how to attract an online audience and determine if you're satisfying their needs. We'll also examine some unique WordPress tools designed to help achieve these goals. To start, you have to make it easy for people to find out about your site. Since 90% of website first visits result from online searches, it's essential that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing know what your site is about and can tell people how to get there. You can make the process work better by using a set of strategies known as search engine optimization or SEO. In Chapter 2, I'll show you a few ways to get your site to rank higher in search engine page results. After your online guests start arriving, the next step is to find out how effectively you're addressing their needs. To gather that information, you must collect statistics. In Chapter 3, we'll look at some tools you can use to record visitor data. And finally, you'll need to analyze the numbers and look for ways to make the website more appealing to the kind of people you want to attract. So we'll discuss how to interpret your stats in Chapter 4. Ready to get started? Let's begin by exploring how to get search engines to notice your site.

2 Chapter 2: Search Engine Optimization These words come from Google's Matt Cutts, a search engine optimization specialist who's a big WordPress fan. And while it's true that WordPress.org is already configured to help websites achieve high search engine rankings, there are many ways you can build on that foundation and do even better! We'll start by looking at a plugin for a site map. Creating a Site Map With a Plugin The first step is to let Google, Bing, and the other search engines know your website is out there. They have programs called spiders (also known as robots) that crawl the Web, looking for content to add to their indexes. Sooner or later, they'll find you and send their spiders to index your site's pages. But if you speed up the process, you're that much closer to attracting a larger audience. The traditional way of introducing your website has been to create a site map, a hierarchical list of your site's pages and posts, and submit it to the search engines. With WordPress, you can avoid the tedium of compiling your own site map by installing a plugin that does the work for you. My favorite is called Google XML Sitemaps ( which has almost 16 million downloads. XML is a markup language (like HTML) and is the format for site map submissions that search engines prefer. You can install Google XML Sitemaps whenever you want, but don't activate it until you've finished building your website. The plugin will ask you to make some choices: Which pages and posts you want to include or exclude If you want to resubmit each time you update the site How often to ask the search engine spiders to crawl each page If you follow the default settings, you'll get good results. And each time you resubmit your site, you can view the outcome:

3 XML Sitemaps submission report Finding the Best Keywords Next we need to talk about keywords. The foundation of effective SEO is choosing strong keywords, the words or phrases that people type into search engines when they're looking for something online. Begin by thinking about your potential visitors. Put yourself in their shoes, and decide which words they'd enter into their browser's search bar to find your site. If your website is geared to a certain geographic area, be sure to include at least one keyword describing your location. From there, you can fine-tune your choices by selecting keywords that'll put your website in front of the people you'd like to attract your target audience. Since each page on your site is different, think about creating a keyword or phrase for each page. Many experts say three- or four-word phrases known as long-tail keywords work better than single words, because they can more precisely describe your niche, and thus attract exactly the kind of people you want. Let's consider this example: Suppose your website is all about digital photography and focuses on two of the most popular camera brands. Instead of using cameras as one of your keywords, long-tail phrases like Nikon digital SLR cameras or Canon digital SLR cameras will weed out potential visitors who are interested in other brands and camera types and will target only the people you want to reach. Once you've selected your keywords, the next step is to know where and how to insert them.

4 Here are the major locations, in order of importance: The <title> tag: This is the most important location on your site for adding a keyword or keyphrase. This HTML tag displays the website's title at the top of the browser window or in a tab. Don't use more than one keyword here, and put it near the beginning of the title, if possible. DOMAIN URL: Your site's address on the World Wide Web. Content: Search engines give highest rankings to pages that contain the most relevant content without overdoing the keywords. Inbound links: You won't be able to control this as easily, but search engines like to see your keywords in the linked text from other sites. The way to encourage inbound links is to publish original content that's fresh and informative. Permalinks: Remember when we created a permalink structure in Lesson 2? As you might recall, a permalink is a single page or post's URL its address on the Internet. Search engines place a lot of importance on pretty permalinks, which very briefly describe the page's contents. When we set up the permalink structure, WordPress automatically added the page or post title. It's a good idea to check permalinks to remove "stop" words (which don't mean anything), like "a" and "the." Also make sure the words are separated by hyphens, and consider adding another relevant keyword or two. To make these changes, update the permalink's slug, its last section, by clicking the Edit button at the end of the Permalink row. Change permalink on an Edit Post Less important but still worth including are keywords in image and menu <alt> tags in the metatags in your website's header and near the beginning of your articles. Here's what's not important: The part of the website's HTML <head> section known as meta keyword tags. In the early days, webmasters would shoehorn dozens of keywords into this section, which is invisible to visitors but open to search engine spiders. But in recent years, Google's ranking system has

5 ignored meta keywords, and Bing pays very little attention to them. So when you incorporate keywords, focus on your website's main content, titles, and URLs. Add keywords and phrases judiciously. Don't use more than one in any area other than content. While it's okay to include two or three keywords or phrases in an article, make sure they're less than 5% of the total word count or you risk being penalized for "keyword stuffing." The Best WordPress SEO Plugins You don't have to handle the optimizing work all by yourself there's help available, in the form of SEO plugins. So that you can decide which plugin works best for your needs, here are a few possible choices: Yoast SEO: With over five million installations, Yoast is one of WP's most popular plugins. It's the most complete SEO package available for WordPress. Most SEO plugins let you write search-engine-friendly custom titles and tags for the site's home page. Yoast goes several steps further, by offering these options for every single website page and post. The plugin encourages you to select keywords for each page and blog post, and makes sure you've used those keywords effectively. Rather than optimizing only the landing page, you can add an SEO title, search engine description, and keywords to each page and post on your site. The plugin analyzes keyword density and placement, inbound and outbound links, and also checks the readability of what you've written. Then it creates a rating and suggests SEO improvements for every page. Sample of Yoast's page analysis

6 The only Yoast plugin feature I don't like so much is the sitemap creator, so I leave that option disabled and use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, described in Chapter 2. Because the Yoast plugin delivers so much SEO power, it's more complicated to configure than others. But whenever you have a setup question, click the Help Center button, below the tabs, for both written and video explanations. All in One SEO Pack: This is my pick when you want to optimize your website with a minimum of fuss. While it's not as comprehensive as Yoast SEO, the All in One SEO plugin is easier to set up. It will create page descriptions, integrate keywords, optimize titles, and create alternate tags for images. It works especially well on e-commerce websites. Like Yoast, this plugin also has a premium version that includes extra support for e-commerce sites and SEO help with your content on social media. Now that we've touched on the basics of getting your website ready for search engines, let's turn to ways to measure your site's popularity. Chapter 3: Statistics and Analysis The Lingo Before we go further, let's define some of the terms we'll be using in the next two chapters: Visits: The number of times a particular computer accesses a Web page. Page views: The total number of different pages on your site that visitors have opened during a specific period. Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who don't go past the site s home page. Hits: Hits are the least useful measure of anything. People sometimes use this as a generic term for visits, but hits actually represent the total pages visited plus the number of elements (like images) on those pages. So if you have a Web page with 10 photos and 12 visitors go there, the total hits would be 132 (12 for the page itself, plus 120 representing the visits multiplied by the page elements). Add more things to your page, and you'll get more hits. As you can see, that's not an accurate measure of popularity. In fact, it s a bit silly, like ranking museums by how much artwork they crowd into their rooms.

7 WordPress Statistics Ready to find out more about the people who'll be visiting your website? The WordPress platform offers many different kinds of applications to zero in on your audience: Full-featured statistics modules that provide a huge amount of data Smaller stats applications to display the most important information Specialty plugins designed to measure only certain data, like RSS feeds or downloads There are five or six well-regarded WordPress plugins that will give you most of the information you'll need about your website. My favorite is Jetpack's Site Stats, which provides statistics on the following: Search terms visitors use to reach your site The most popular keywords, referrers, and pages, by period day, week, month, or year Subscriptions to your blog and comments about your posts Site Stats (also known as WordPress.com Stats) installs automatically when you connect to Jetpack. It has a simple configuration screen to let you add a page view chart to the admin bar and ignore visits from you and other contributors. Site Stats displays statistics in three different locations: The Administration Area's Dashboard Click the Screen Options tab in the top right corner of the Dashboard screen, and check the box next to Site Stats:

8 Site Stats in the WP Dashboard You can set up this box to show statistics by day, week, month, quarter, or year by clicking Configure in the top right corner. The Jetpack > Site Stats Screen Open this screen from the WordPress menu in the far left column of any admin area page.

9 The main Site Stats screen This screen indicates what's popular, so you can focus on topics that your visitors want to read. Enhanced Stats There's even more info available by viewing the statistics page on your WordPress.com account. (Remember that you had to create a WordPress.com account in order to install Jetpack.) Clicking the Show Me button under the date on the Site Stats page takes you there. The Insights section of the WP.com page displays your posting activity and the total number of page views and visitors, along with the date with the most views. The Days/Weeks/Months/Years tabs count page views and visitors, page and post visits, visitors' countries, and popular search terms. You can also find out how many visitors each search engine directed to the website, as well as the URLs of other referral sites. And that's not all! You can click any post or page link to see when it's been visited. Click Search Engines in the Referrer section to display how many referrals each has made.

10 Drilling down on the Stats page WP.com Site Stats is a powerful statistics-gathering application. But there are others that do an equally good job, such as Slim Stat Analytics, which tells you exactly which posts and pages visitors are reading, in real time. And, of course, there's Google Analytics, the world's most popular application for examining website traffic. While it wasn't designed specifically for the WordPress platform, you can install any of several plugins that will post its results in your WP website's administration area. For a complete list of statistics plugins, go to Plugins > Add New and enter stats in the search bar. It's beyond the scope of this course to explain how to sign up for and configure Google Analytics, but the information is easy to find online. Linking Google Analytics to Your WordPress Site Google Analyticator is an easy to install and fully featured plugin for linking Google Analytics to your WordPress website. Every Google Analytics website gets a tracking code, which must be installed in the site's <head> section. This plugin will do that for you, saving you the hassle of venturing into HTML. The Analyticator also adds a 30-day summary to your Dashboard page and gives you the option of displaying visitor stats in a widget. More Suggested Plugins Looking to collect some specialized information? These plugins focus on specific functions: Feed Statistics: This plugin measures responses to your site's RSS feeds how many people are reading them, which feed-reader applications they use, and which articles are most popular. WordPress Download Monitor: This plugin keeps track of the documents downloaded from your website, including PDFs, Word and Excel files, and even e-books.

11 Just a few years ago, there were at least a half-dozen free plugins that tracked website performance on social sites like Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and Twitter. But it appears none of them is still being actively supported. You can however check out a premium social analytics plugin at socialmetricspro.com if you wish. Now you know how to gather information on your visitors. In the next chapter, we'll discuss how to use your stats to make your site more effective! Chapter 4: Analyzing Statistics So why are we going to the trouble of collecting all this data? If your website is to succeed, you've got to know who your visitors are where they come from, how they found you, what interests them, and how to motivate them. When you understand your audience, you can then tailor your site to fill their needs. Interpreting statistics can also tell you how you're doing: Are you attracting the kind of visitors you really want? Is your banner advertising effective? What about your promotions are they producing the results you expected? What to Look For You've gathered the data. Now you need to analyze it. Let's examine a few things you should look for as you sort through the data.

12 Zeroing In on Your Visitors Most of the data you've examined so far have come from sitewide statistics, measuring your total audience. But you can also learn a great deal by examining the individual logs that record a single visitor's travels around your website. Logs like these are available only in applications that track realtime movement, like SlimStat Analytics.

13 Visitor tracking in SlimStat Analytics From this record, we can determine: There were seven visitors during the period. They come from five different countries (see flag icons). One visitor spent eight minutes on the site the others seem to be bounces. By itself, there's nothing particularly instructive about this visit. But if you look at several of these logs, you'll begin to notice common trends and behaviors. Individual logs tell you whether a visitor reached your site by entering a specific search term. When you're trying to sell products, you can determine if the people who end up buying chose the same search terms. If they did, you'll want to include these terms as keywords.

14 Or when you're trying to increase the size of contributions to a nonprofit site, find the visitors who made the largest donations, and check which pages they visited. If there's a common path, you'll know which messages triggered the larger gifts. Let's wrap up this lesson in Chapter 5 before we move on to our final lesson for this course! Chapter 5: Summary With what you now know about attracting and retaining an audience, you should be better able to protect your investment of time and energy in developing your website. The WordPress platform gives you an automatic head start on search engine optimization (SEO). And when you combine WP's basic search-friendliness with plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast, your website is more likely to do well in search engine page results. From notifying Google, Yahoo, and the others that your site is up and running, to helping you include your keywords in all the right places, WordPress plugins automate the drudgery of search optimization! When your online audience begins to take shape, you can use your site's statistics to monitor progress. Today, you found out about the most comprehensive statistics plugins, as well as some specialized WordPress add-ons designed to track visitors' activity on your Web pages. And we discussed what to do with the data you collected. Using the results to give your audience more of what it wants and less of what it doesn't need will help you meet your goals. We'll dig deeper into WordPress for our final lesson. You'll get a closer look at the PHP scripting language, and we'll open the WordPress bag of tricks and explore how to do some very cool things. Congratulations on almost completing this course. See you in Lesson 12!