Not all stats programs are created equal.  And you’ll find that not all hosting companies have stats programs readily available for their customers.  The bottom line is, however, that at some point, your customer will ask you how the website is performing.  If the company sells products, that is always a very good indication of performance, but it doesn’t give you a clear picture of WHY products are selling.  That’s why you’ll need stats.

Now, there are a lot of programs out there and many of them are superb.  I’m not recommending one program over another, I’m simply going to point out the easiest and cheapest (at no cost except the time it takes to install) stats program available today and that is Google Analytics.

You will need to have a Google account (free and easy to sign up) and then you can create your Google Analytics (GA) account.  GA is a nice program for webmasters because it allows you to add multiple sites to your profile, while also giving limited access for reviewing reports to anyone who has a Google account.  You can restrict their access to only the website they should have access to, while you can review all the reports in one single location.

To install the program, you’ll need to add a new website profile and get the small piece of tracking code provided.  Install that on all the pages you want to track stats for and VOILA! that’s all there is to it.  GA will start gathering data immediately.

Now, it does lack some reporting flexibility that I’ve come to enjoy in other programs and you do not have any ability (that I’ve been able to find) to customize reports outside of the minor things GA provides.  However, it will show you the main stats and a number of other interesting reports that can assist you and your customer in determining how well the website is performing.

ADWORDS INTEGRATION:

GA has the ability to track your Google Adwords account inside the GA application, giving you one single location to check all of your stats.  This is EXTREMELY useful because reviewing what works on PPC vs. organic and vice versa can be very helpful in improving the performance of your website.

Your customers will love the pretty graphs and the fact that the stats are at their fingertips, whenever they want to view them - and let me tell you, I’ve had customers who view their stats daily, if not hourly!  People LOVE stats.

Get out there and get Google Analytics on your new site - it takes no time to install and it’s a great way to show how well your SEO campaign is working for your customers!

Yes, it’s a good thing to have on your site and be sure to consider it in any new design plan, or updating a current site.  The site should have an up to date XML sitemap (per Google), as well as an HTML version that will show the entire site structure in one place for easier spidering (as well as helping out a lost visitor).  Yahoo has requested a text version of the sitemap to be submitted, as well.

Recently, however, a new procedure has been adapted in an effort to make the sitemap process easier.  By adding a line on the robots.txt file that all sites should have uploaded, the spiders are alerted to the location of the sitemap and will immediately go to it.  It is my understanding that Google is currently recommending the continuation of submission to the Google Sitemaps site along with the Robots.txt file inclusion.

It’s a simple line of code that looks like:

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

Read more about Google’s interpretation of this new procedure here: Sitemaps as part of the Robots.txt file

I know that when you’re designing a web site, you’re not thinking ANYTHING about content.  But if your customer wants ‘design with SEO in mind’, you should consider the copy, even if you’re not writing it.

First off, you want to have your keywords (See previous post).  That list will need to be handed over to the copy writer.  The keywords need to broken down by page, which may be the job of the copy writer, or the designer, depending upon your experience with the market.  At any rate, the copy should be written in such a way that it naturally uses the keywords chosen for each page.  You don’t want to keyword STUFF, which tends to make the content seem extremely unnatural.  Although the search engines aren’t thinking like humans (yet), they do have very sophisticated filters that will be able to tell stuffed content.  Another thing to consider is your reader - sure you want to get traffic TO YOUR SITE, but if they flee immediately because the content is unreadable, what have you really achieved?

Susan Sparza from Bruce Clay, Inc. has an excellent breakdown of writing for SEO (first published in the SEO News).  Read a copy of Writing for Search Engines here.