Alright you have your site, you performed your SEO plan to the best of your ability, how do you track the success? Reading earlier you may have learned how to use Google Webmaster Tools and installed them on your site. Now you may want to get more into the meat and potatoes of tracking SEO success. Google Analytics is the easiest and most affordable way to track your results (its free!).
All you need is FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access and you can install a simple code and let the tracking begin. Install the code between the <body> and <body/> tags in your site. If you have no clue what you are doing you may want to contact your hosting provider to give them the code that google analytics provides to you after you sign up your site. Just send them an email that you want them to add it to all the pages of your active site, 24 hours later you will have some data and going forward you will be able to track each visitor to your site. You can track, IP, city, network, browser type and more! You can even track when a searcher lands on your site and proceeds to a checkout or maybe even a contact form. You can track your month to month results to show where you were last month and where you are today. See how many visits you got today, yesterday, last week or last month. Look to see what is your most popular page, what page gets the most hits, or how many pages the avg. site visitor views before leaving the site.
You can use Analytics to really gauge how well your SEO campaign is doing, or your PPC program. Bounce rate is a very important statistic of your site. This tells you how effective the web pages in your site are for what they are being found under. Meaning if someone was to search for blue widgets, and found your green widgets page, chances are they are going to leave the page to find a blue widget, giving you a bounce. More to come with bounce rates and how to use Google Analytics.