March 7th, 2010 by Mike

One of the enduring myths about SEO is that it is a practise that isn’t welcomed by the search engines, but this is couldn’t be more wrong, however, and search engine optimisation is not only welcomed by engines like Google, but they actually produce a variety of analysis tools to facilitate it. But what are these tools and which are the best methods of collecting data?

Well the big tool for monitoring traffic and a variety of other factors is Google Analytics, and if you practise SEO and you don’t run Analytics, basically you’re not doing it right! But what kind of data can Analytics offer and how do you put it to best use?

Simply, Google Analytics will provide you with all of the relevant clickstream data that will enable you to engineer a successful search engine optimization campaign. But what exactly is clickstream data? Basically it is data regarding visits, visitor sources, bounce rates, links from keywords etc. The value of these view bit of information in terms of SEO should be clear, but lets explore them a little:

Google Analytics will show you where most of your links are coming from, so if you’ve established a blog, with back links to your websites, all the links from that blog will be delineated for you; now you will be able to gauge accurately and easily the effectiveness of your various link building strategies, and efficiency of your various keyword focuses its as easy as that right?

Whilst Google Analytics might seem like a miraculous SEO tool, considering that it’s a tool produced by Google to help you exploit their page rankings its not entirely perfect and essentially by incorporating Analytics into your page you are providing Google with access to all of your sites information, most would say that this is a small price to pay.

Luckily, for the more paranoid link builder amongst you, there are a variety of other non-Google search engine optimisation tools available, and some of the best include the following:

Keyword suggestion tool, keyword density checker, meta tag generator, link popularity checker and a broken link checker. These fantastic free online SEO tools can help you to get the most out of any SEO campaign.

Of course, it doesn’t matter where you get your data from if you don’t know how to implement it and this should be done with a detailed report, with your data clearly put into categories. Keeping a handle on your SEO data is the best way to track your campaign.