SEO Analytics

Overall SEO Analysis is still in what I would the ‘infancy’ when the major public channels (webmasterworld, seomoz, searchengineland) still produce what is considered to be “quality” content with no pure analysis (and sometimes even no facts) to back up their opinions. That is why I wanted to include a page here to provide my thoughts on SEO analytics, and how search engine optimization should strive towards a more solid foundation rather than pure anecdotal thoughts.

The biggest pet peeve of mine currently (that may vary on a day-to-day basis) would probably be the concept that PageRank (PR) does not matter and that everyone who focuses on PageRank is just believing in hype. You will find this concept often on WebMasterWorld, but often times on Sphinn. It is not a surprising concept to find as most people involved in SEO are marketers with no background in statistics, much less econometrics (and therefore dealing with SEO analysis and analytics is out of their league without that learning).

For me SEO analytics needs a combination of some kind of strong analytics program (Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics, etc) with some strong statistical or econometric analysis in order to fully deal with the multi-variable and time-lagging nature of SEO. Of course, anyone with some basic econometric background will know how tough this will be considering the how strong endogeneity will be along with the numerous interaction effects that is on a constantly changing market.

Therefore, whenever I put forth some kind of SEO Analytics concept or just search engine optimization in general, I will likely be thinking in a very econometric mindset and may quickly dismiss any data not factually provided, so please do not see this as a being condescending, but rather as my mode of mindset when I try to approach SEO with a very analytical and statistical framework.

The following are some posts that go further into SEO Analytics: