We’ve talked about algorithms and keywords used by SEOs, let’s take a short peek at some of the metrics you will want to consider monitoring for your site.
• Keyword tracking will tell you where traffic is coming from,
• Backlinks are incoming hyperlinks from one page to another and the more backlinks you can ethically point back to your site, the more hits you will receive,
• Volume of traffic changes,
• Your search should be increasing, if it isn’t you need to monitor and determine why,
• See how long users linger on your page,
• A change in the definition of your user’s profiles,
• See what users are looking at on your site, you want your users to spend more time looking at all the cool stuff you offer, whether it’s products or news articles,
• Confirm that you have repeat users, you want them to come back often,
• Watch your bounce rate, which means the volume of users who bounce from site to site quickly looking for what they want and not finding it. High bounce rates can be the product of a slow loading website, so be sure you have optimized your speed. Check your server as well, it could be slowing down speed if it isn’t equipped to manage your traffic.
• Remember the ant army and their indexing efforts? Check your page for any indexing errors and correct them immediately,
• You can even check to see what devices are hitting your page, computers, tablets, or phones. This goes back to our earlier point of having one site that functions well for all devices and browsers,
• Keep an eye on how many times the ant army hits your page. This is referred to as crawling and the higher a crawl statistic, the better,
• You want all your pages to be indexed, monitor that as well,
• Be positive all your links work properly, there is nothing more discouraging to a user than getting a constant page error.
• Have a security application that will detect, eliminate and report on any malware issues.

SEO is here to stay and if your goal is to attract traffic, you need to learn to use them, monitor them for success and make changes on the fly to keep the right traffic headed your way. As technology has advanced, so have metrics and monitoring, it’s just one more tool for you to make your page more successful.