David Fiske A subtle blend of affiliate marketing and web development

To measure my progress, I will need a base level - a benchmark to measure all other successes by.

The money and conversions are easy. I started with nothing. However, the SEO side of things requires a bit more planning.

It should be noted that how the figures are calculated is not important - it is consistency that is. If I measure Google links this week, and then Yahoo next, there is no consistency and my results will be volatile.
 
There are a couple of tools that you should get if you are serious about SEO.

Firstly, get Firefox. If you use Internet Explorer for surfing and developing, use Firefox for SEO purposes. Enough said.

Once you have installed Firefox, head over to SEO Book and download SEO for Firefox.

(As a side note, SEO Book is a downloadable pdf guide. It explains how to optimise your site for search engines and comes with a few bonuses. It is currently 328 pages long, selling for $79 and comes with a lifetime of free updates - worth so much more than the book! SEO Book)

What SEO for Firefox does is provide extra information about Google results. The screenshot below shows some of these details:



The details given are those that I will use to create a report.

(Another side note. Whilst we are talking about Firefox extensions, download the Web Developer Extension. This has loads of features that lets you analyse pages so you can help diagnose problems. You may also want to download Search Status which interfaces Alexa.)

I am creating reports in a spreadsheet to perform analysis later on.

Incidentally, SEO for Firefox queries MSN and Yahoo for links but not Google. To do this yourself, go to Google and type site:www.mydomain.com. The count at the top shows how many pages Google is currently listing.

My stats are for www.comparesatnav.co.uk and for www.dbfcs.co.uk/shop/sat_nav so I have had to create two reports essentially.

CSN

• Page Rank: 0
• Google links: 4
• Yahoo! links: 161
• MSN links: 44
• Links back to this site (Google stats): 0

DBF

• Page Rank: 0
• Google links: 172
• Yahoo! links: 553
• MSN links: 1828
• Links back to this site (Google stats): 0

Please note that the DBF statistics may be flawed as some of the stats are for the entire domain, not just a subsection.