Tactics to monitor your web site's performance25 January 2005
From tracking your search engine position to simply finding out who is linking to your site - there's a range of practical tools and tactics that can help your gauge the success of your online marketing efforts and web site performaance.
- Ego searching means finding out where your name or business is mentioned on the web - this could be in forums, reviews, blog posts, online articles or news releases. Entering "your name" or "your business name" (include inverted commas for more specific results) into search engines will reveal where you appear on the web.
- If you want to find out who else has linked to your site, try typing your URL in to Copyscape. It will give you a list of sites who've featured you.
- To measure the success of a link-building strategy, try this simple trick on any search engine. Type "link:www.yourwebsitename.co.uk" for a list of all the web sites that include a link back to you.
- If you've submitted your web site to search engines, you should monitor your ranking closely. Monitoring search engines is also useful for keeping an eye on the most popular keywords and searched-for phrases. Alexa's research tools can help you analyse how your competitors' web sites rank compared to your own, and see where else visitors to your site go for similar information or a similar service. And Google Alerts sends email updates of the latest relevant Google results for your chosen topic from either or both Google News and Google Searches.
- If you're trying to optimise your website to improve your search engine ranking, SEO Guy will tell you how keyword friendly your site is, and how many other people link to it.
- Use Any Browser to check how your website appears in different browsers. This will help you ensure that it's accessible to all users, not just people using the same browser as you.
- You can even use the Internet to monitor your website's performance, using tools like Internet Seer, which remotely monitors your site's availability round the clock, and sends you an instant e-mail alert if your site goes down.
- For more web monitoring tools and applications visit Monitoring Tools or Monitoring Software.
