It is important to track the progress (or not) of any blogs/websites you are running. This can be done by creating a simple spreadsheet which can be updated on a regular basis. The thing to be careful of when recording data in this way is not to become so focused on the statistics that you do not continue to update and promote your website. Nobody else is going to do it for you.
Typically, websites take quite a long time (minimum six months, realistically, 12 months or more at least) to get established (unless you have tons of money to throw at a huge marketing campaign) and it is easy to get disheartened in the early days and throw it all in just before the pay off begins. The question is – how long do you give it before you decide the site really isn’t working and is just eating into your time and resources? This is where the monitoring spreadsheet will come in, it will be able to offer you information on the progress that has been made. But, the final decision will depend upon your own personal circumstances and the goals you were hoping to achieve with your website.
The financial cost of running a website can actually be very low. It is likely you would have internet access even if you didn’t have a website, so your only financial burden (if you didn’t pay for any other services such as newsletter mailings etc) would be the cost of hosting your website. There are some really good deals around at the moment, but the average cost would be around £40/$95 per year for a hosting account that is adequate for most people’s needs. Not a lot of money in the great scheme of things, especially if your website can generate some income for you.
The real cost is your time and emotions, which in turn depends upon your goals. If you are happy working full time for somebody else and running your website as a hobby, the personal strain will not be a great as somebody who is running a website as a business.
What type of information should you monitor?
There are subject specific factors to monitor here, but there are also general factors which apply to all websites. Perhaps the most important factor is traffic. After all, there is not much point in having a website which does not attract visitors.
I have never come across a web host which does not include a stats package as part of the deal, but you may wish to add Google Analytics to your website as well. This will enable you to see how many people are visiting your site, where they are coming from and their behaviour once they arrive. It will also help you to discover traffic sources as well as the most and least visited pages.
Google Analytics won’t cost you any money to use and comes with a load of useful features, but, there are many people who do not like the idea of sharing the type of information Analytics records with Google, and therefore refuse to use it. A decent alternative is StatCounter, which records a lot of the same information but has the added advantage of being updated as you watch (Google Analytics is updated every 24 hours). I use StatCounter on two or three of my sites and I actually like it a lot.
It is very simple to implement either system; just add a bit of code to your web pages (before the closing BODY tag). If you are using WordPress there are several plugins you can use.
Google Webmaster Tools offers a lot of information about your website and can help diagnose any problems that may be occurring. Using the tools available here I discovered that one of my websites had been cloned, twice. I emailed the owners of the cloned versions and one of them removed it straight away, but the other ignored my emails and the site is still up!
With GWT you can track the following information:
- Pages which are not being found
- Pages restricted by your robots.txt file
- Duplicate meta description tags
- Long and short meta description tags
- Missing title tags
- Duplicate and non informative title tags
- Long and short title tags
- Top search queries
- The amount of pages indexed by Google
- Links to your site
- Related sites in Google’s index
- Feed subscribers
Adding the information from the reports to your spreadsheet will enable you to see how your website has progressed and it will enable you to fix any problems that may be stopping the site from progressing.
It is also a good idea to track the PageRank associated with each page, or at least your main pages if your website is quite large, as this will also indicate how much progress is being made.
Two other rankings which I suggest you record are created by Alexa and Technorati. As I said at the start of the post, don’t get too caught up watching and monitoring this kind of information, but over a period of six months or so it is good to see improvements on these figures and it will give you an indication as to how your website is perceived.
You can record and monitor any type of indicator you wish – you may like to record the amount of people following you on Twitter, Facebook or StumbleUpon. The amount of feedback you receive through comments or emails may be an important factor to you and the amount of people signing up for your newsletter may also be worth tracking.
The most important factor is to actually record this information on a weekly or monthly basis and use it to see how things are going. It can give you the boost you need to carry on or it can help you make the decision to give it up and move on to something else.
|
|
|
|
Related posts:
- Don’t Give Up On Your Website or Blog!
- How to link Google Analytics and Google AdSense
- Real time tracking data from Google Analytics
- Use Google Site Search via Analytics to see what your visitors are searching your site for
- No! You don’t need to submit your blog or website to Google
- Get an alert by email or SMS when your website goes down
- Google Analytics on your iPhone
- How to test your website design or blog theme in multiple browsers
- How to Find Out Which Pages From a Website Have Been Stumbled
- Plan the directory structure of your website before you start building it
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Have you tried gostats? I’ve found it to be much more capable than statcount and provide fewer limitations. (I’ve tried both and still have not found a realtime one better)
For Alexa, have you ever found those numbers to be accurate? I’ve had a hard time getting accurate data out of low traffic sites.
No, I have never tried using gostats. I have had a quick look at the webite and it looks like it would be worth setting up on one of my sites to see how well it works.
With regards to Alexa, it is very difficult to guage how accurate their figures are as data is only recorded by Alexa users and people who have the Alexa toolbar installed. I don’t really take the Alexa figures very seriously but I do think it gives a good indication as to the progress being made by a website.