Google Tracking and Reporting

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.

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