Chapter 10. Testing Your Site and Monitoring Your Progress

Once you have built your website and started promoting it, you'll want to monitor your progress to ensure that your hard work is yielding both high rankings, search engine visibility, and web traffic. In this chapter, we'll cover a range of tools with which you will monitor the quality of your website, learn how search spiders interact with your site, measure your rankings in search engines for various keywords, and analyze how your visitors behave when they are on your site. With this information, you can gauge your progress and make adjustments to your strategy.

Obviously, you'll want to know where your web traffic is coming from, what search terms are being used to find your website, and where you are ranking in the search engines for each of these terms. This information will allow you to see what you still need to work on in terms of building links to the pages on your website.

There are five main tools...