Setting Up my Blog for Analysis and Search Engines

Drawing upon my web design background, I realize that for my newly established blog to truly succeed I'm going to have to first: A) Set up visitor analysis so I can see who (and their demographics) is visiting my site and B) Set up my site for optimum search engine optimization (SEO for you acronym savvy people).

Visitor Analysis

For the people who haven't really ran a website (or in this case blog) before, I'll explain why visitor analysis is important. In the case of this blog, for true success I'm going to need both repeat and unique visitors coming to read my content. Analysis programs like Google Analytics help webmasters and blog owners see how many visitors view their site, how many of those visitors are unique, and also how long the site retains that visitor's attention before they get bored. Other important information can be gained from these analysis programs but for now that's all I'm concerned about.

Google Analytics

Now that I've explained the basics of visitor analysis I'm going to go with one that I'm most familiar with and that also many people will also argue is the best: Google Analytics. While I've seen quite a few blogs still utilizing the ancient linkback images of the 1990s (which I find tacky and way out of date), I find Analytics much better and cleaner method of visitor tracking. Setting up Analytics with Blogger is quite simple and literally took me less than two minutes to do.

Setting up Google Analytics for Blogger

1. Create or log into your account at the Google Analytics page.
2. Click "Add new profile".
   
3. Select "Add a Profile for a new domain" and enter in your web address and time zone. Select Finish when you're done.
4. On the next page, select and copy the code displayed for "ga.js" which will be what we will be using in our blog.
5. Now in Blogger, select the "Layouts" tab and then select "Page Elements".
6. Go to the Footer of your blog design (the Analytics tracker must be located here) and select "Add a Gadget".
7. Click the "HTML/JavaScript" Element.
8. The title will be left blank and the context box will be the code you copied early. Paste that code in the box and click "Save".
9. Click "Save" again on your "Page Elements" page and voila you're finished.

Once you've finished with inserting the code on your blog, within a few minutes Google should be analyzing your page. If it's having troubles locating the tracking code, delete the JavaScript code you inserted and follow the steps again. Otherwise, good job, and happy tracking!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Now that I've successfully finished setting up my analysis code it's now time to start getting search engines like Google or Yahoo! to start noticing my blog and start sending me visitors through their searches. Unfortunately, however, Blogger (even though it's owned and managed by Google) has inherently poor SEO out of the box and so I have to either create or use someone else's code to correct that. Luckily for me, someone has already done the hard work.

Basically when we add the code (Found here: webupd8) to our blog we will have the title of the post changed to reflect how search engines post links as well as add meta data and descriptions to our HTML code for search engines too. Basically, most search engines will only accept 80 characters for a title of a web page and so if any pages surpass that number it cuts off the extra characters. So, in the best interest of SEO, we're going to want to have the first part of our HTML title be the current "Blog Post Title" and then "Blog Site Title" which is achieved with the above code.

Putting the new code into your blog is even more simple than Google Analytics. So what you're going to do is:

1. Copy the code above to prepare to replace the old code currently on your Blogger page
2. Go to your Blogger dashboard. Select the "Layout" tab and then select "Edit HTML".
3. Find the line containing the title tags and replace it with your copied code from above.
4. And congratulations, you have added the basics of SEO to your blog.

Now that I've achieved this step of the money-making blog process, now I need to focus on adding relevant and quality information to this blog to drag in the visitors.