To be done right, SEO needs to be planned carefully and be methodical. Often companies will apply educated guesswork in the absence of real data. All though the answers may seem like common sense often what you perceive differs widely from the truth.

Analysis is the key and analytics of some sort needs to be available to all staff involved in this aspect of work. You will need to have accurate data of:

• Specific traffic sources (search engine, referring site, direct input)
• Search engine search terms that are effective in bringing traffic
• Which pages are being visited
• How people move around the site
• If people leave the site, where are they leaving you from?

This data will allow you to accurately track the success or failure of an e-marketing campaign and your search engine optimisation work in general. Google Analytics is the most widely used analytics software although some comparative analysis used with other analytic software has exposed some discrepancies in the data reported by Google, especially the traffic is claims its own search engine is providing. Other data that needs to be tracked to allow SEO work to be most effective includes:

• Which sites links to you?
• Which sites do you link to?
• Are any of your internal/external links broken?
• Who are linking to our competitors?
• How certain pages are performing with respect to certain key phrases, how your competitors are performing? Being able to track how this performance changes over time is also important. Any changes made to web pages should be logged and tracked.
• General traffic trends to our sites