Web Analytics & SEO 101?

June 26, 2007 12:21 PM

I'm starting a new job and need to get up to speed on web analytics and SEO.

It's not a technical position, so I don't need to know the finer details; just enough to know what my IT people are talking about! I've been in grad school for a few years, but come from an IT background. Books, blogs, and sites would be great (forums less so, because I don't even know what questions I have yet).

posted by snickerdoodle to technology (8 comments total)

Previously (about forums). Forums are more useful than you might think when it comes to SEO since it's not really necessary to ask questions to learn.. you learn from the tidbits you read, the larger articles that are posted, etc. SEO is not like learning a programming language.. you gotta keep reading the latest things people are posting about to keep ahead of the game. WebMasterWorld is probably the best place to do this.. read that every day and you'll be on the pulse of what Google's doing with its algorithms.
posted by wackybrit at 12:37 PM on June 26, 2007

I think SEO is a lot of crap and a few good, basic principles. There are a number of good books on web analytics which I think there's more real data to analyze. Try Eric Peterson's "Web Analytics Demystified" or "Web Analytics in an Hour a Day" by Avinash Kaushik.
posted by GuyZero at 12:58 PM on June 26, 2007

The zillions of dollars that doe-eyed execs spend on SEO would be better spent buying sponsored links on Google.
posted by rhizome at 2:21 PM on June 26, 2007

Heh. Wow, you got a job shoveling bullshit? Damn, easy. :D Unless you're also selling bullshit, which is tough.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization -- is basically getting high pagerank in various search engines. It's easy to do if you have relevant content that's specialized to your industry and people can use your site as a resource to help them learn about the topic and make decisions... which means that you'll get links from highly ranked blogs, which means that your page rank will go up. If you *don't* have compelling content, and you're in a highly trafficed market, you'll need to find some resources (i.e. seomoz.org) that will keep you up to date on what tricks you can use to game the search engines. The problem with gaming the search engines is that periodically they'll change algorithms to exclude the latest set of tricks, and then it'll start all over again. You could probably be more successful at keeping your pagerank high by sitting at your desk reading Moby Dick and other stories of titanic struggles than starting your own titanic struggle.

Analytics ... well, that's a convoluted area too. Different sources of analytics will report different things. By far, I think the best way to do things is doing your own statistics processing on very verbose web server logs. In my experience, Google Analytics significantly underreports your traffic, but that might actually be the most accurate based on their knowledge of who's a bot and who's hitting refresh and not. ;) No way to tell, really... so do what I do: Use multiple sources, and make it up!
posted by SpecialK at 5:44 PM on June 26, 2007

You might try the "I'm new to web development" forum over at webmasterworld, it has lots of info on how things work when it comes to search engines and site structure, links, etc.

Searchenginewatch has a decent intro write-up on the various search engines, and how they do rankings, etc.

Read the background info on the Google Analytics site. They do a pretty good job of covering what's going on with the analysis that happens if you have a GA account.

I haven't read Aaron Wall's "SEO Book", but I hear it's good.
posted by gemmy at 5:51 PM on June 26, 2007

Basics of search engine optimisation (and SEO archives)
Generating Simple URLs for Search Engines
Using XHTML/CSS for an Effective SEO Campaign
High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization
SEO advice: url canonicalization
Ethical search engine optimisation my foot!
The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 1 and Part 2
posted by kirkaracha at 6:57 PM on June 26, 2007 [2 favorites]

Beth recently did an excellent video on web analytics - you might want to check that out.
posted by labnol at 2:31 AM on June 28, 2007

When I had to reference SEO materials (after initially learning what I needed to do) I always kept my ABC of SEO book around.
posted by enriquem at 11:39 AM on June 29, 2007