Categorized | SEO, Wordpress

Wordpress SEO and Tracking

Posted on 26 October 2009 by Paul Patrick Dale

Wordpress News > Wordpress SEO and Tracking

Wordpress-MD

You can easily make your Wordpress-powered website more Google-Friendly by putting in a little extra time and effort and see immediate results. Although there are both plugins and services which can increase your sites search engine optimization, you have to learn how to use (tweak) them effectively to get the most out of them. It can be intimidating when you’re working with things that often times are not very user-friendly, but don’t be deterred, there are some excellent tutorial resources available. I’ve gathered a few of them together here to help you get started. If you take your time and follow through them in order, Google will love your site and you’ll be able to closely track your sites visitor activity.

1. Yoast’s SEO Guide

Joost de Valk over at Yoast.com has a comprehensive article detailing how to configure nearly all Wordpress variables for site SEO. I suggest you start by following his guide and implement everything he suggests. There are quite a few steps to follow through, but it’s worth the extra effort! Here’s a quick look at what you’ll find there.

Show »

  1. The basic technical optimization: simplest stuff, highest rewards
    1. Permalinks
    2. Optimize your Titles for SEO
    3. Optimize your Descriptions
    4. Optimize the More text
    5. Image Optimization
  2. Template optimization
    1. Breadcrumbs
    2. Headings
    3. Clean up your code
    4. Aim for speed
    5. Rethink that Sidebar
  3. Advanced technical optimization: preventing duplicate content
    1. Noindex, follow archive pages
    2. Disable unnecessary archives
    3. Pagination
    4. Nofollowing unnecessary links
  4. Altering your blog’s structure for high rankings
    1. Pages instead of posts
    2. New wine in an old bottle: use well ranking-posts to rank even better
    3. Linking to related posts
  5. Conversion optimization: get those readers to subscribe!
  6. Comment optimization: get those readers involved
    1. How should you get people to comment
    2. Bond with your commenters
    3. Keeping people in the conversation
  7. Off site blog SEO
    1. Follow your commenters
    2. Use Twitter
    3. Find related blogs, and work them
  8. Conclusion

yoast 100x100 Wordpress SEO and Tracking

CLICK ME

2. Google Analytics

If you have completed the steps in Yoast’s guide, it’s time to set things up to see what Google is seeing. To do that you will have to set up a Google Analytics account and configure it to track your site. Google has a complete, well organized help page to get you started.  Again, take your time and be patient with yourself if this is your first time configuring SEO and tracking. Here’s a look at what you’ll find there:

Show »

analytics 100x100 Wordpress SEO and Tracking

CLICK ME

3. CLI.GS

You are probably familiar with URL-shortening services such as tiny-url. In addition to shortening otherwise long website addresses, there are some services which track the activity of shortened URL’s you have created. Let’s say you have created a great new blog post which you want people to read. If you Twitter about the post with a shortened URL, you can track how many people visit your blog post through twitter.  I have found the best service for doing this is cli.gs. It’s very easy to create a free cli.gs account and add new URL’s. Once you get things up and running, you will be able to see complete details on your site visitors. Take a look at cli.gs’s details below:

Show »

Cligs: Short URLs with analytics, social media monitoring, and geotargeting

Cligs Helps You Understand Your Traffic

  • Does anyone care what you post on Twitter?
  • Which marketing messages work best?
  • Who is clicking on your links?
  • Which email campaign is the best investment?

These are the types of questions anyone working on the web asks. You need to understand what is working and what is not. You need hard data to help you figure out how your marketing message is doing. That is where Cligs helps you!

Cligs tracks the traffic going through your links. Not just that, Cligs has unique tracking and redirection features that give you the best insight:

  • Cligs is free! You do not pay us anything to use all of its awesome features.
  • Private analytics No one apart from you can see your stats data. This way your competitors will not be able to see your marketing campaigns and how successful they are. To do that, you will need to register and sign into Cligs.
  • Real time analytics You want to know what is working now so you can adjust quickly.
  • Deepest analytics around Lots of interactive charts and data, like a world map, that show you where your traffic is coming from and who are the people clicking on your links.
  • Social media monitoring Cligs keeps track in real time of who tweets your link, who shares it on Friendfeed, who links to it, who blogs about it, who writes a blog comment about it, and more. Not just that, Cligs does that for the destination URL too! All in one handy interface.
  • Multiple links to the same destination Share different links on different services like Twitter, Facebook, and email and track the traffic and watch it spread across services.
  • Search engine optimized Cligs uses the 301 forward which is recommended by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft to help you get the best rankings benefits.
  • Easy to tweet With one click you can send your short URLs to Twitter. No fuss.
  • Custom URLs Get your brand name in your links! You can create links like http://cli.gs/MyBrand.
  • Real time analytics You want to know what is working now so you can adjust quickly.

Deep Real-time Analytics

Cligs keeps track of the following (and more!) in real time:

  • Hits time: when your traffic came in.
  • Geographical location of your visitors: where are your visitors located?
  • Search engine bots: have the search engines found your links? They need to so they can count the link towards your ranking!
  • Social media monitoring: for both the short URL and its destination, Cligs tracks the following:
    • Twitter mentions: Who tweeted about your link?
    • Friendfeeed mentions: Who shared your link on Friendfeed?
    • Blog links: Which blogs wrote about your short URL?
    • Web links: Not just blogs, but all websites: who is linking to you?
    • Blog comments: Who is writing about your short URL in blog comments around the web?
    • Delicious saves: for the destination only, Cligs tracks who saved the link to their delicious account.
  • Referral statistics: which links actually sent you traffic? It is not enough just to know who links to you but to also know who sends traffic!

Geotargeted Destination URLs

Only on Cligs – no other service does this! – you can provide alternative destinations URLs that different visitors from different countries are forwarded to. This means you can target your marketing and promotions on a per-country basis and capture the value of all the traffic going through your links! This is a great feature for marketers who need local focus like affiliate marketers and real-estate agents.

This feature is called Right Clig which is fully explained on the Right Clig home page, which also includes a demo video.

Search Engine Friendly

Cligs is 100% search engine friendly. We do NOT block any robots/bots/crawlers/spiders (whatever you want to call them). Also, Cligs uses 301 forwarding which is the most search engine friendly forwarding method recommended by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

Tools

Cligs has lots of tools to make your life easier. We have a bookmarklet, a Google Gadget to use in iGoogle and GMail (!), a Ubiquity command, and integration into Firefox extensions. Also, Cligs users have created tools you can use too like a Wordpress plugin. Not just that, if you use Twitterfeed, you can use Cligs too with your Twitterfeed account!

Full details and download links in our Tools page.

API

If you want to build a custom application using Cligs, you can use our free API. The API is very easy to use, and is already being used by many different users and software. There is also a developer-only mailing list where we discuss API development and you can ask geeky questions and get sensible answers.

Full details on the Cligs API home page.

Key Cligs Pages

Some key pages on Cligs:

CLICK ME

CLICK ME

4. CLI.GS + Google Analytics

Congratulations if you have sweated through the first three steps. You’ll be thankful you put in the time and effort  Now let’s configure your new Google Analytics site tracking to factor in visitors from your cli.gs. It only requires a couple lines of code. Click the image below for easy instructions, or hit “Show”

Show »

Track Short URLs Clicks from Twitter with Google Analytics

Track clicks on short URLs from Twitter with Google Analytics for your own links that is.

Because of the url shortening services, you will see clicks on short urls from Twitter tools that redirect to your website as direct hits. Yeah, you can see those coming from Twitter.com, but most of the people using Twitter never even visit twitter.com. Yoast published an article for how to use it with short url service http://cli.gs but i did what he said in that post and yet it didn’t work for me. Also, you need a server to upload a file and so on, while it can be done in a much easier way. Here’s how to do it using a simple bookmarklet / no extenral php file needed:

1. bookmarklet to use with api (if you want individual statistics for links on http://cli.gs – requires an account on http://cli.gs and then an api key): create a new bookmark with this code in it:

1

javascript:(function(){%20window.open('http://cli.gs/api/v1/cligs/create?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href+'?utm_campaign=blog&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=micro-blog')+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&key=YOUR_API_KEY'+'&appid=77');%20})();

Of course, replace YOUR_API_KEY with … your api key :)

2. bookmarklet to use without an account: create a new bookmark with this code in it:

1

javascript:(function(){%20window.open('http://cli.gs/cligs/new?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href'?utm_campaign=blog&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=micro-blog')+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title));%20})();

When you are on a page you wish to shorten url and track, click the bookmarklet and and there you have it: the short url with GA campaign tracking in it.

Now some explainations on how this tracks clicks to short urls using Google Analytics.

This method of tracking uses Google Analytics’ campaign tracking feature. It will track anyone visiting the site as a result of your tweet, regardless of where they clicked on the URL. It doesn’t matter if it’s in an email client, hosted email app. etc. This is the secret to tracking tweets with GA: adding campaign information to your short url. The campaign information in the URL will bucket the visitor as part of the blog campaign and as someone who was reached by the ‘micro-blogging’ medium. Here’s how the data looks in the All Traffic Sources report:

twitter GA

webupd8 1 Wordpress SEO and Tracking

CLICK ME

5. Wordpress Plugins

Here are a list of links to the Wordpress plugins you will need to accomplish all of the above easily without having to touch a line of code.

I hope you’ve found this article useful. Let me know if you have any suggestions to add. Now I’m off to create a cli.gs URL, add it to Google Analytics and see if/when you visit!

article sources:
http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/?hl=en
http://cli.gs/
http://webupd8.blogspot.com/2009/03/track-clicks-on-short-urls-from-twitter.html

Leave a Reply