Comments on: The Most Essential SEO Data To Measure

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 12:07:21 +0000

Thanks David for the comment!

By: David

David — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:02:07 +0000

Great list and always good to see conversion as a point of data to measure. I do have questions around the number of pages indexed, as does this include those in the supplementary index?

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:17:35 +0000

Hi Gisela,
Thanks for the question. Honestly, that is a much deeper and complex question. I would start by reading each of the search engine webmaster guidelines. Then I would make sure you have an updated XML sitemap. Other than that, this would need to be looked at much deeper.

Hi Dustin,
Please feel free to reference this post any way you see fit. Thanks for being a loyal reader!

Hi Rifki,
Excellent point, and a great one to add to the list!

Hi MasterLinker,
Excellent additional points, thanks so much for sharing this information with everyone. Have a happy new year as well!

By: MasterLinker

MasterLinker — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:47:50 +0000

Hi Nick,

You made some excellent points with this article. Here are a couple of additional thoughts to complement what you have written.

I agree that your metric #1 is incredibly important to the success of any for-profit website (hence your #1 ranking), and unlike your other three metrics it is directly attributable to on-page SEO and “salesmanship.” If you don’t convert your visitors to sales, then all of your other SEO efforts are worthless. Webmasters should test headline and copy variations, offers, guarantees, etc. in an never-ending effort to close 100% of the prospects that visit their site.

Building backlinks is extremely important to the success of any website because they improve all of your metrics except #1. In fact, backlinks are so important that I would rank them #2 (behind closing sales) for the following reasons:

1. According to information published by Google, the more links you have pointing to your site, the more pages in your site Google will index. Thus, links are critical to improving the metric in your point #4. (I’m not sure if this applies to Bing/Yahoo as I haven’t seen anything indicating this that was directly published by them.)

2. Your rankings in SERPs for your keywords (your metric #3), are directly attributable to the number of high-quality backlinks pointing to your website using those keywords in the anchor text. This fact is universal to all of the major search engines. So to improve your SERP rankings for your keywords, you need to build more backlinks using those keywords.

3. More than 87% of all organic traffic originates from searches in search engines or from links themselves. As a result, building backlinks is extremely critical to increasing your metric #2.

Again, thank you for raising this subject and providing valuable advice. Keep up the good work Nick, and I hope you have a great 2010!

By: Rifki

Rifki — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:46:49 +0000

Hi Nick,

Great post once again.

I would add subscribers to your blogs, feeds, newsletters etc, as another measure of the effectveness of your SEO.

Thanks,

Rifki

By: Lorraine Grula

Lorraine Grula — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:03:24 +0000

What a great list. Thanks. I hear so many people talk about nothing besides inbound links and that is last on your list. But if you are not even being indexed, then obviously that is an issue.

I sure appreciate all your good information Nick.

By: Dustin

Dustin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:19:00 +0000

Hi Nick,

I read everyone of your newsletters – this one is one of my favorites and I will likely repost/tweet with your permission?

As an optimization consultant – I have this (or a similar) conversation multiple times a week – glad to know I’m not alone

Keep up the good work!

Happy trails,
Dustin