If you blog with passion you need to be tracking your efforts online. Today there are many tools that can help you to gain more insight into what readers are reading and how they find your links online.
First we all blog because we can, want and are able to do so with ease, but have you ever wondered if people are reading. One thing about blogging is that you can not track your online success by looking at comments until big traffic hits.
You should first install these following free analytic tools that work well in giving you some direction when it comes to SEO.
1) Woopra is a way cool tracking tool that gives live real time results on your traffic. You can see from where you traffic came from, where they arrived in your page, how long they staid and weather or not it came from organic search or sponsored links.
2) Lijit sends a weekly report on traffic and other important stats that can help shape your efforts. Lijit is also a search box widget you can add to your blog. This will allow readers to search keywords for posts you may have done. It will pull post from your blog’s archive. Lijit also shows others all your profiles on all your social networks by hitting buttons inside this widget.
Listen to Bloggers School interview with Lijit, to learn more about this tool.
3) Feedjit is the first tracking widget I ever used on my blogs. It is simple and tells the story you need to know about your visitors. Shows searches and links to Google pages and other search engines, showing how the search was performed. One thing is the location finder is good but not very precise. Sometimes it will show a visitor from somewhere they are not in. Two ways to test this are:
- While traveling view check the Feedjit in your blog, but be sure and set the widget settings to stop ignoring your browser. This tool is able to track our not your IP address, so you can ignore your visits to your site and get true results.
- Have a friend from another town, city, state or country go to your blog so you can compar the location you see to the location this person really is.
Learning how your readers are coming to you, how they are searching and what keywords they are using will help you to make adjustments to your content. One of the best things of blogs is that everything is easily editable and updatable. Take advantage of it and optimize your content. However, never forget you are writing and talking to people, not to search engines. Test, test, test! Ask people’s opinion, compare and mesure.
Google Analytics is very powerful tool, but their reports are not very precise when it comes to blogs.
