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Another great SEO Tool from CodeGravity (JoomlaWatch)
Search Engine Optimization
is all about making your site readable, not only by the search engines' bots but also by the end user. If your website is readable bot crawling will be smoother and your site will have less trouble being indexed.
SEO Basics refers to the correct use of tags within your markup. The title tag is very important, not only because it shows up on the search results page, but because it is meant to tell users and bots what the page is about. The title should be unique for each page within your site and it's also important for it to be brief and descriptive. Another tag that should be wisely used is the description meta tag. The description should also be unique for each page of your site.
One of the SEO pillars is Site Structure which defines how easy it is for users and bots to navigate through your page. URL's play the leading role on how easy it is to navigate a site, and because of this it is of outmost importance to ensure that the url's are easy to read. A way to do this is by making sure our url's contain readable words instead of unrecognizable parameters, this way we will be giving visitors and bots a lot of information about our site. Take into account that url's show up on the search engine result's page, and keywords in the url are usually highlighted.
Another SEO pillar is Content. Basically your site will be indexed accordingly with the quality of the content on your site.
Last, but not least, a very important part of SEO is Analysis and this is specifically where JoomlaWatch comes in. Only through analyzing the site's stats will you be able to find opportunities for improvement. The SEO Report compliments the other great JoomlaWatch tools will give you an overview of what is going on from the moment a user types the keywords in the search engine up to the moment they leave your site.
The brand new JoomlaWatch SEO Report Tab.
Another new feature of the recently released 1.2.18 version of JoomlaWatch is the SEO Tab. The SEO tab features the most popular URLs that were found and followed by visitors on their Google searches, the keywords or phrases they searched for and relevant data for each keyword or search.
From this report, along with the page title of the visited page ( the page that was referenced to the user by Google ), you get in general :
Date Controls: These are the usual JoomlaWatch date controls. They help you navigate across dates in a day-by-day basis and they provide a way of quickly going to today's date without having to go back on our steps when looking at the historical report.
Total Visits Count: On the right-top corner of the Report, you get an overview of the total amount of visits your site has had in the selected date that came from Google Searches. Along with this number, you get the percentage that this number represents out of the Global Visit Count (Google + other sources).
In figure 1, we can see that for the selected date, Google referenced a total of 249 visitors to my website. Right next to this I can see that Visitors from Google represented a total of 13.9% out of the total visits count of my website for the selected date.
Page Title List: Right below the general visit count, you get a list of page titles. Each page title itself is a link to the website page that was visited by the Google user. I recommend doing control+click on the page if you want to check it out, otherwise you would be taken away since the link will open in the same tab.
Individual Pages SEO Report:
Each page title has its own data table and each data table has the following characteristics (columns):
1. URI: The URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) column displays the list of keywords or key phrases that users entered in their search terms when they were directed to your site. They are displayed in descending order , by visit count. Each keyword or key phrase is a link.
In order to corroborate the accuracy of the report, you may click on any of the keyword(s) links and a new tab will be open and you will be seeing the actual Google search results. This is done by inserting the recorded user query in the GET request of a Google search request. This way you can verify that you are actually seeing the mentioned results.
One thing that you need to keep in mind is that Google search results may vary from one user to other depending on their saved cookies, browser preferences and physical location.
Tip: If you just opened a Google search, even if you site is listed as first for the specified keywords, click on it (give it one more click for relevance), then stay on that page for a few minutes and click another link, leave that page open' this behavior may help you prevent Google from detecting a not-clicked search result if you don't follow your link, and may also help you prevent Google detecting a Bounce, that is when the search results is clicked, the link is followed by the user but he leaves the page immediately after that.
2. Search Result Num: This simple displays the position your page was displayed at in the search results for the user specified keywords.
3. Count: The amount of times the system recorded the same set of keywords or phrases. Basically the amount of visitors that found your site using the same search phrase.
4. Percent: This column displays the percentage of visits that each set of key words represent from the GLOBAL visits count. Again, on Figure 1, I can see that the first set of keywords represents 1.95% of the overall site visits.
5. 1-day, 7-day, 28-day change rates: If you have previously used JoomlaWatch, you are familiar with these columns. They represent the variation between the currently selected date and the day before, then 7 days before and 28 days before. The reason for having 28 days and not 30 is that 4 weeks are exactly 28 days and not 30.
6. Charts (Figure 2) : these are similar to the other reports charts They give you the Daily and Weekly stats of the selected page in a two rows display. The first row of data below each bar is for the trend variation and variation rate. The colors are intuitive, red for a decrease and green for a raise. You also get the option to send the chart to the default printer. I my case, I use the printer functionality to store as PDF.
7. Most Dynamic Keyphrases: (Figure 3) The most dynamic keyphrases report is located at the bottom of the page titles list. This report displays a slightly different table with the following data:
- a. Keyphrase: The keyword set or keyphrase.
- b. Min Position: the lowest (lower is good) position your site ranked when matched for the given keyphrase.
- c. Max Position: the highest (high is bad) position your site ranked for the given keyphrase.
- d. Average Position: The average between the lowest and highest positions.
- e. Count: the match count, how many times this keyphrase produced a match at Google.
- f. Change rates: Per day change rates, based on the average position.
This part of the SEO report is especially useful for monitoring multi-country search results. Remember that search results may vary depending on the geographical localization of the visitor. The goal here should be to reduce the average position by reducing the max position. Hopefully in the future we will be able to click on the max position in order to see what country the visitor was visiting from. In the meanwhile, one solution can be increasing the amount of keywords and potentially related keywords on the pages being optimized.
SEO + Live Stats Integration
Similar to the new heatmap section, the SEO section is also integrated to the existing Live Stats report. On the LiveStats Report, you will notice that certain URLs, besides indicating you the URL they came from (the referrer URL), they indicate 'Search Result Num.: ..'
The Search Result Num.: is the position your website URL was listed at in the user's Google search results.
The next line is the keyword(s) or phrases the user entered as search terms. Just like in the main SEO tab, you can click on this line and new tab will be opened to show you the real Google search and its results. You may also click on the URL line (your site's URL) and it will take you to the URL within your site that the Google user was directed to when looking for info.
Note: The SEO functionality only works for Google Referrals being Google the industry's standard.
Email Notifications: You will also receive nightly SEO reports for your site via email. The component will deliver the SEO report to the default email address pre-configured in the emails tab.
Using JoomlaWatch along with Google Analytics.
There is no need to have a GA (Google Analytics) script/key on your website in order to have the new SEO report working properly and giving you insights of your site's SEO performance at Google.
JoomlaWatch is in fact no competitor of GA, it is a tool that is meant to be used as your ally in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) process. While GA provides a standardized way of monitoring your site's traffic and SEO performance over time, I the new JoomlaWatch SEO toolset is meant to be used day by day in real time, to monitor real time data and act in a faster manner than you would do if you have to wait to see visitors trends in GA.
I personally think you can get real benefits from using the two tools together. GA will provide you industry's standard reports and JoomlaWatch will give you real time SEO monitoring and click tracking.
Also, since JoomlaWatch engine resides directly at your site, it was possible for CodeGravity to add additional tools to it to help you control not only SEO but complete site traffic, traffic flow and anti- spam filters (also improved in the new release) and IP blocking.
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