Lesson 11:

WordPress SEO, Statistics, and Analysis

Chapter 1: Introduction

Welcome to Lesson 11! We're in the home stretch now.

So you've been spending lots of time learning how to build and optimize WordPress websites, but what

if you launch your site and nobody visits? And if you do get visitors, how can you know if you're giving

them the information they came for?

This lesson will answer those questions by showing you how to attract an online audience and

determine if you're satisfying their needs. We'll also examine some unique WordPress tools

designed to help achieve these goals.

To start, you have to make it easy for people to find out about your site. Since 90% of website first

visits result from online searches, it's essential that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing know

what your site is about and can tell people how to get there. You can

make the process work better by using a set of strategies known as

search engine optimization—or SEO.

In Chapter 2, I'll show you a few ways to get your site to rank higher in

search engine page results.

After your online guests start arriving, the next step is to find out how

effectively you're addressing their needs. To gather that

information, you must collect statistics. In Chapter 3, we'll look at some tools you can use to record

visitor data.

And finally, you'll need to analyze the numbers and look for ways to make the website more appealing

to the kind of people you want to attract. So we'll discuss how to interpret your stats in Chapter 4.

Ready to get started? Let's begin by exploring how to get search engines to notice your site.

Chapter 2: Search Engine Optimization

These words come from Google's Matt Cutts, a search engine optimization specialist who's a big

WordPress fan. And while it's true that WordPress.org is already configured to help websites achieve

high search engine rankings, there are many ways you can build on that foundation and do even

better! We'll start by looking at a plugin for a site map.

Creating a Site Map With a Plugin

The first step is to let Google, Bing, and the other search engines know your website is out there. They

have programs called spiders (also known as robots) that crawl the Web, looking for content to add to

their indexes. Sooner or later, they'll find you and send their spiders to index your site's pages. But if

you speed up the process, you're that much closer to attracting a larger audience.

The traditional way of introducing your website has been to create a site map, a hierarchical list of

your site's pages and posts, and submit it to the search engines. With WordPress, you can avoid the

tedium of compiling your own site map by installing a plugin that does the work for you.

My favorite is called Google XML Sitemaps (https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-

sitemapgenerator/), which has almost 16 million downloads. XML is a markup language (like HTML)

and is the format for site map submissions that search engines prefer.

You can install Google XML Sitemaps whenever you want, but don't activate it until you've finished

building your website. The plugin will ask you to make some choices:

• Which pages and posts you want to include or exclude

• If you want to resubmit each time you update the site

• How often to ask the search engine spiders to crawl each page

If you follow the default settings, you'll get good results. And each time you resubmit your site, you can

view the outcome:

XML Sitemaps submission report

Finding the Best Keywords

Next we need to talk about keywords. The foundation of effective SEO is choosing strong keywords,

the words or phrases that people type into search engines when they're looking for something online.

Begin by thinking about your potential visitors. Put yourself in their shoes, and decide which words

they'd enter into their browser's search bar to find your site. If your website is geared to a certain

geographic area, be sure to include at least one keyword describing your location.

From there, you can fine-tune your choices by selecting keywords that'll put your website in front of

the people you'd like to attract—your target audience.

Since each page on your site is different, think about creating a keyword or phrase for each page. Many

experts say three- or four-word phrases—known as long-tail keywords—work better than single

words, because they can more precisely describe your niche, and thus attract exactly the kind of

people you want.

Let's consider this example: Suppose your website is all about digital photography and focuses on two

of the most popular camera brands. Instead of using cameras as one of your keywords, long-tail

phrases like Nikon digital SLR cameras or Canon digital SLR cameras will weed out potential visitors

who are interested in other brands and camera types and will target only the people you want to

reach.

Once you've selected your keywords, the next step is to know where and how to insert them.

Here are the major locations, in order of importance:

• The <title> tag: This is the most important location on your site for adding a keyword or

keyphrase. This HTML tag displays the website's title at the top of the browser window or in

a tab. Don't use more than one keyword here, and put it near the beginning of the title, if

possible.

• DOMAIN URL: Your site's address on the World Wide Web.

• Content: Search engines give highest rankings to pages that contain the most relevant

content without overdoing the keywords.

• Inbound links: You won't be able to control this as easily, but search engines like to see

your keywords in the linked text from other sites. The way to encourage inbound links is to

publish original content that's fresh and informative.

• Permalinks: You should avoid modifying your permalinks for two primary reasons. First,

unless you’re very careful, you can mess up your site’s internal structure resulting in 404

error message (content not found). Second, renaming permalinks can have a quite negative

effect on your SEO. However, there are a couple of valid reasons you might need to change

them (your site is being revised to have a new focus or you inherited a site with bad

permalinks. If you do need to modify them, please read this tutorial carefully and follow its

instructions to avoid problems:

https://www.wpexplorer.com/change-permalinks-wordpress/

• Tags: Less important—but still worth including—are keywords in image and menu <alt>

tags in the metatags in your website's header and near the beginning of your articles.

Here's what's not important: The part of the website's HTML <head> section known as meta keyword

tags. In the early days, webmasters would shoehorn dozens of keywords into this section, which is

invisible to visitors but open to search engine spiders. But in recent years, Google's ranking system has

ignored meta keywords, and Bing pays very little attention to them. So when you incorporate

keywords, focus on your website's main content, titles, and URLs.

Add keywords and phrases judiciously. Don't use more than one in any area other than content. While

it's okay to include two or three keywords or phrases in an article, make sure they're less than 5% of

the total word count—or you risk being penalized for "keyword stuffing."

The Best WordPress SEO Plugins

You don't have to handle the optimizing work all by yourself—there's help available, in the form of SEO

plugins.

So that you can decide which plugin works best for your needs, here are a few possible choices:

Yoast SEO: With over five million installations, Yoast is one of WP's most popular plugins. It's the most

complete SEO package available for WordPress.

Most SEO plugins let you write search-engine-friendly custom titles and tags for the site's home page.

Yoast goes several steps further, by offering these options for every single website page and post. The

plugin encourages you to select keywords for each page and blog post, and makes sure you've used

those keywords effectively. Rather than optimizing only the landing page, you can add an SEO title,

search engine description, and keywords to each page and post on your site. The plugin analyzes

keyword density and placement, inbound and outbound links, and also checks the readability of what

you've written. Then it creates a rating and suggests SEO improvements for every page.

Sample of Yoast's page analysis

The only Yoast plugin feature I don't like so much is the sitemap creator, so I leave that option disabled

and use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, described in Chapter 2.

Because the Yoast plugin delivers so much SEO power, it's more complicated to configure than others.

But whenever you have a setup question, click the Help Center button, below the tabs, for both

written and video explanations.

All in One SEO Pack: This is my pick when you want to optimize your website with a minimum of fuss.

While it's not as comprehensive as Yoast SEO, the All in One SEO plugin is easier to set up. It will

create page descriptions, integrate keywords, optimize titles, and create alternate tags for images. It

works especially well on e-commerce websites. Like Yoast, this plugin also has a premium version that

includes extra support for e-commerce sites and SEO help with your content on social media.

Now that we've touched on the basics of getting your website ready for search engines, let's turn to

ways to measure your site's popularity.

Chapter 3: Statistics and Analysis

The Lingo

Before we go further, let's define some of the terms we'll be using in the next two chapters:

• Visits: The number of times a particular computer accesses a Web page.

• Page views: The total number of different pages on your site that visitors have opened

during a specific period.

• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who don't go past the site’s home page.

• Hits: Hits are the least useful measure of anything. People sometimes use this as a generic

term for visits, but hits actually represent the total pages visited plus the number of

elements (like images) on those pages. So if you have a Web page with 10 photos and 12

visitors go there, the total hits would be 132 (12 for the page itself, plus 120 representing

the visits multiplied by the page elements). Add more things to your page, and you'll get

more hits. As you can see, that's not an accurate measure of popularity. In fact, it’s a bit

silly, like ranking museums by how much artwork they crowd into their rooms.

WordPress Statistics

Ready to find out more about the people who'll be visiting your website? The WordPress platform

offers many different kinds of applications to zero in on your audience:

• Full-featured statistics modules that provide a huge amount of data

• Smaller stats applications to display the most important information

• Specialty plugins designed to measure only certain data, like RSS feeds or downloads

There are five or six well-regarded WordPress plugins that will give you most of the information you'll

need about your website. My favorite is Jetpack's Site Stats, which provides statistics on the following:

• Search terms visitors use to reach your site

• The most popular keywords, referrers, and pages, by period—day, week, month, or year

• Subscriptions to your blog and comments about your posts

Site Stats (also known as WordPress.com Stats) installs automatically when you connect to Jetpack. It

has a simple configuration screen to let you add a page view chart to the admin bar and ignore visits

from you and other contributors.

Site Stats displays statistics in two different locations:

The Jetpack > Site Stats Screen

Open this screen from the WordPress menu in the far left column of any admin area page.

The main Site Stats screen

This screen indicates what's popular, so you can focus on topics that your visitors want to read.

Enhanced Stats

There's even more info available by viewing the statistics page on your WordPress.com account.

(Remember that you had to create a WordPress.com account in order to install Jetpack.) Clicking the

Show Me button under the date on the Site Stats page takes you there.

The Insights section of the WP.com page displays your posting activity and the total number of page

views and visitors, along with the date with the most views. The Days/Weeks/Months/Years tabs count

page views and visitors, page and post visits, visitors' countries, and popular search terms. You can also

find out how many visitors each search engine directed to the website, as well as the URLs of other

referral sites.

And that's not all! You can click any post or page link to see when it's been visited. Click Search Engines

in the Referrer section to display how many referrals each has made.

Drilling down on the Stats page

WP.com Site Stats is a powerful statistics-gathering application. But there are others that do an equally

good job, such as Slim Stat Analytics, which tells you exactly which posts and pages visitors are

reading, in real time. And, of course, there's Google Analytics, the world's most popular application for

examining website traffic. While it wasn't designed specifically for the WordPress platform, you can

install any of several plugins that will post its results in your WP website's administration area. For a

complete list of statistics plugins, go to Plugins > Add New and enter stats in the search bar.

It's beyond the scope of this course to explain how to sign up for and configure Google Analytics, but

the information is easy to find online.

Linking Google Analytics to Your WordPress Site

Google Analyticator is an easy to install and fully featured plugin for linking Google Analytics to your

WordPress website. Every Google Analytics website gets a tracking code, which must be installed in the

site's <head> section. This plugin will do that for you, saving you the hassle of venturing into HTML. The

Analyticator also adds a 30-day summary to your Dashboard page and gives you the option of

displaying visitor stats in a widget.

More Suggested Plugins

Looking to collect some specialized information? These plugins focus on specific functions:

Feed Statistics: This plugin measures responses to your site's RSS feeds—how many people are reading

them, which feed-reader applications they use, and which articles are most popular.

WordPress Download Monitor: This plugin keeps track of the documents downloaded from your

website, including PDFs, Word and Excel files, and even e-books.

Just a few years ago, there were at least a half-dozen free plugins that tracked website performance on

social sites like Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and Twitter. But it appears none of them is still being

actively supported. You can however check out a premium social analytics plugin at

socialmetricspro.com if you wish.

Now you know how to gather information on your visitors. In the next chapter, we'll discuss how to use

your stats to make your site more effective!

Chapter 4: Analyzing Statistics

So why are we going to the trouble of collecting all this data?

If your website is to succeed, you've got to know who your visitors are—where they come from, how

they found you, what interests them, and how to motivate them. When you understand your

audience, you can then tailor your site to fill their needs.

Interpreting statistics can also tell you how you're doing: Are you attracting the kind of visitors you

really want? Is your banner advertising effective? What about your promotions—are they producing

the results you expected?

What to Look For

You've gathered the data. Now you need to analyze it. Let's examine a few things you should look for

as you sort through the data.

Zeroing In on Your Visitors

Most of the data you've examined so far have come from sitewide statistics, measuring your total

audience. But you can also learn a great deal by examining the individual logs that record a single

visitor's travels around your website. Logs like these are available only in applications that track

realtime movement, like SlimStat Analytics.

Visitor tracking in SlimStat Analytics

From this record, we can determine:

• There were seven visitors during the period.

• They come from five different countries (see flag icons).

• One visitor spent eight minutes on the site—the others seem to be bounces.

By itself, there's nothing particularly instructive about this visit. But if you look at several of these logs,

you'll begin to notice common trends and behaviors.

Individual logs tell you whether a visitor reached your site by entering a specific search term. When

you're trying to sell products, you can determine if the people who end up buying chose the same

search terms. If they did, you'll want to include these terms as keywords.

Or when you're trying to increase the size of contributions to a nonprofit site, find the visitors who

made the largest donations, and check which pages they visited. If there's a common path, you'll know

which messages triggered the larger gifts.

Let's wrap up this lesson in Chapter 5 before we move on to our final lesson for this course!

Chapter 5: Summary

With what you now know about attracting and retaining an audience, you should be better able to

protect your investment of time and energy in developing your website.

The WordPress platform gives you an automatic head start on search engine optimization (SEO). And

when you combine WP's basic search-friendliness with plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast, your

website is more likely to do well in search engine page results.

From notifying Google, Yahoo, and the others that your site is up and running, to helping you include

your keywords in all the right places, WordPress plugins automate the drudgery of search

optimization!

When your online audience begins to take shape, you can use your site's statistics to monitor progress.

Today, you found out about the most comprehensive statistics plugins, as well as some specialized

WordPress add-ons designed to track visitors' activity on your Web pages. And we discussed what to

do with the data you collected. Using the results to give your audience more of what it wants—and less

of what it doesn't need—will help you meet your goals.

We'll dig deeper into WordPress for our final lesson. You'll get a closer look at the PHP scripting

language, and we'll open the WordPress bag of tricks and explore how to do some very cool things.

Congratulations on almost completing this course. See you in Lesson 12!