Google Tracker

Our search engine optimization component focuses on tracking and reporting of Google visits. We built it this way for a two reasons. First (and most important) we did this because Google is the most frequently used search engine. Secondly, we did this because Google is currently the strictest and most aggressive search engine in terms of ranking relevancy. Therefore we feel that by tracking Google results we are providing the best gauge of a site's effectiveness. If you're doing well with Google, you're very likely to be doing well in other search engines. This may not always be true, so we built our system to be able to change or add in other search engines in the future if it becomes necessary.


Our Google tracker tracks individual user sessions that result from clicks on Google search result pages. In other words, whenever someone types a search into Google, and clicks on a result leading to your site, our Google tracker logs the visit, records the phrase used in the Google search, and logs the actual site page the visitor landed on (since most search engine visits do not start with the homepage). We also begin to track that particular user's session, logging every page they go to starting from the page they landed on. Once we start tracking, we track not only their initial session from Google, but also all future sessions whether they come back to the site from Google or not.


Most website traffic reports provide information on search engine visits. They report frequency, number of visits, and even most used phrases. The difference between our tracking system and overall website traffic reports is the depth of individual session tracking. It's one thing to know that there were so many overall visits from Google, and the overall phrases used, it's another to be able to see which specific visits resulted in multiple page views, and exactly which pages were viewed by a particular session, as well as who the most active visitors were. Basically, we pick up by tracking depth where standard logs stop and only report on overall activity.

This is important because when you are making effort to pull in search engine traffic, you ultimately want these hits to result in longer site visits. If someone hits just one page from a search engine and then leaves, that hit was not ultimately very productive. However, if a user hits the site from a search engine and sticks around looking at multiple pages, or better yet, comes back to the site on multiple occasions that would be considered a much more productive visit from a search engine. Likewise, knowing which phrases led people to your site and kept them there, is much more useful information than simply which phrases got them there but did not necessarily keep their interest.

Another benefit of tracking individual user sessions, as opposed to just recording overall stats, is that we have the potential to capture and associate actual user information (email address) if the user ever fills out a form on the site. For example, suppose a user comes to our site from a search engine. Our system assigns that user a numeric ID and begins tracking all of the pages they view. Now let's say I get an email from that user through my contact form. The system appends the users email address (that they just voluntarily supplied) to their previously recorded sessions. Now I can review all their site activity before I respond to the email. I'll already know roughly what they are interested in by looking at what information on the site they've accessed. Of course this is just a side benefit of this system. Its ultimate benefit is that it helps refine your efforts in optimizing site content (especially titles), which we'll expand on next.

There are two ways that we display search engine results in our system. One is through a series of NewfangledCMS reports. The other is by displaying results right on each page of the site when you are logged into the NewfangledCMS.

Active Google stats display - If you're unfamiliar with the way the NewfangledCMS works, once you login as a site administrator the live website itself recognizes you as a logged in administrator. It provides you with "Select" buttons next to all editable content throughout the site. You simply mouse over the Select button and click "Edit" to access the content editing screen for that piece of content (you can try this out on this site). Similarly, with the Google tracker installed, when you log into the NewfangledCMS, each site page will provide you with a mini-Google activity report for that page. The information displayed includes the total number of times that particular page has been hit from Google. It also tells you when the last time Googlebot (Google's search engine spider that indexes your site from time to time) hit your site, as well as the last time it hit that particular page (Googlebot doesn't look at every single page every time it comes). This is helpful especially for newly created site pages. You'll want to know when Google has been to that page after you've created it so you can begin looking for that page in Google.* The active site display also records the date and time of the most recent hit on that page from Google.

Finally, our system creates a link to the "Total phrase hits" report, which tells you exactly which phrases were used to reach this page. This is one of the most helpful pieces of information for refining your content (especially titles) for optimum Google position. For example, if I have a page that I have titled "typography of a website" about website typography, but I see in my phrases list that more people reached this page using an alternate phrase like "website typography" I would know that I should re-title my page with this new phrase, since more people use it than the phrase I initially guessed at. The more exact a phrase match, the higher my page will show up on a Google results page. Knowing what users actually used as a phrase to reach my page informs me of how people are searching for content, and how they are finding me.

Additional NewfangledCMS Google reports - In addition to the page by page active display, there are additional Google reports provided in the NewfangledCMS. These include a full list of user sessions (with links to actual pages viewed per session), total users session by month, a comparison of sessions to actual page views, most used phrases overall, most active users (users who came back more than once and those who looked at the most pages), and the most commonly accessed pages from all Google visits.

These reports show me what sessions and phrases are most effective both in terms of frequency of visits and how productive these visits are (how many other sites pages are viewed as a result of the visits). Based on this knowledge, I can augment certain pages with additional information to further encourage site usage. For example, one of the most productive phrases on our site is "website layout." This phrase when typed into Google shows our "Common website layout mistakes" page in our "Web Design Resources" - search engine sensitive pages section. It's been hit 377 times as of this writing. When I began to see that this page was getting solid traffic, I added some additional content to this page, I wanted to make visitors aware of our agency partnerships, our book Client vs. Developer Wars about the web development process, as well as the rest of our Web Smart newsletters, specifically the ones offering web design tips for print designers.

	Visits	Page Views	Average Page Views
November 2003	182	1381	7.5 (begining November 17th)
December 2003	317	2682	8.4
January 2004	554	3544	6.3
February 2004	827	3564	4.3
March 2004	1054	4236	4.0
April 2004	1022	5422	5.3
May 2004	754	6097	8.0 (as of May 22nd)
Total	4710	26,926	5.7

Since we've been experimenting and testing our new strategy and tools we have seen a significant increase of search engine traffic and overall site usage.

Keep in mind that this information is just tracking Google as a gauge of overall effectiveness. I can use my Urchin reports to get overall search engine numbers. But using Google as a conservative gauge, I can see overall improvement and specific areas of opportunity where I can refine content to focus in on particularly well performing phrases thereby improving and optimizing performance.

Another factor that determines the position of your pages in Google is your Google "PageRank." PageRank is Google's determination of how popular your website is compared to other sites on the web. It ranks the site on a scale of 0-10. Generally speaking the way Google determines this is by counting the number of other sites that link to your site. The more sites that link to you, the higher your PageRank will be. Depending on how high the PageRank of the site that links to you is, the more it will influence your own page's PageRank. There are other factors that influence PageRank. Google is quite secretive about how all this works, but it's always a good idea to solicit a link from other sites back to your site to improve your own PageRank.

If you want to check your site's current PageRank you can download and install the Google Toolbar (toolbar.google.com) and turn the PageRank option on. Just click on the Google logo on the toolbar and choose "options" and check "display PageRank." This will add a small green bar to the Google toolbar. If you mouse over this bar on any given site it will display that page's PageRank. I only turn this on when I want to check a page's PageRank and I then turn it off because Google tracks the sites you look at when PageRank is turned on as one factor in determining overall PageRanks. You can also check PageRank with some online tools such as www.pagerank.net/pagerank-checker and www.rankwhere.com/google-page-rank.php.

* You can check to see if your page has been indexed by Google in a couple ways. First, try typing in the title of the page to see if it shows up. Depending on how specific your phrase is, how much competition there is for that phrase, and how high your PageRank is, your site should show up in the results. If it does not, try copying a specific phrase from the content of the page you're checking. Make sure it is a very specific phrase, likely to be unique to the page. Then paste that phrase into a Google search, surrounding it with quotation marks. If your page is indexed it should come to the top of the list. If it does not, it means that either Googlebot has not spidered that page yet, or else they haven't re-indexed their database since they last spidered the page. Try looking for the page again in a few days.