Twinkly's SEO for beginners *day 5*

We've reached the end of the week. Let's have a little look back shall we? Click the days of the week to be returned to that days tasks.

On Sunday, I explained how to install the toolbar and check your PageRank. On Monday, we talked about how to start gathering words which could turn out to be fabulous Keywords for your shop and item descriptions. On Tuesday we looked at using Google tools to find out how often words are searched, and started to narrow down our words to a tight selection of perfect keywords for your shop. On Wednesday, I went more in depth into searching using Google tools, and then explained a bit about relevant backlinks.We planned a link exchange, and I featured everyone who wanted to take part on my blog post on Friday.

And now we are on Saturday, because I'm a terribly disorganised Twinkly of late. I'm going to presume a few things. Like my friends on Etsy, I'm going to presume you have now filled your shop with lots of marvellous keywords. Although I haven't gone into much detail here, it's easy to see how the same principles and probably lots of your 'words' can be used to make your descriptions as awesome as your section titles and announcement probably are!

So what's next?

There's a lot of in-depth stuff about SEO online. If you want to continue on your quest for SEO perfection, Handmadeology have some amazing articles. But you could also leave it as is for now and follow your progress using Google Analytics.

Here are some quick instructions to checking whether your search engine and Google hits have increased.

1. Keep plugging your link, other people's links and linking, linking, linking. Post your shop section links on your Facebook, your items in your blog, and your main URL on twitter. Or whichever. You get it, right?

2.Wait a month for Google to crawl your page a few times and for people to have a chance to see your link. Now that you've made your shop announcement beautiful and stuffed full of keywords, you're going to be all the more appealing to people browsing. Don't forget you can check when your page was last 'crawled' by clicking your PageRank icon and choosing 'Cached Snapshot of this page' The page will reload with a thin info bar across the top with the date that Google crawled.

3. Open up and log into Google Analytics. Then on the 'Overview' page, select your Etsy shop report.

There's a couple of really useful things we can do from here.

Firstly, run your mouse over the date range in the top right hand corner. Click, and select the date range from the day you started SEO to the day you are checking. (At least a month, really.)

Now, what can we see?

Just above the graph on the right hand side is a little row of three icons. The second one along will change your graph to measure over the month rather than show you each day's results plotted. I love this button. It produces a fabulous upwards blue line that gives me a sense of satisfaction.

Scroll down a little and you'll see a bunch of other tiny graphs. Some will be upwards-pointing, like Pageviews, Visits and New Visits. Hopefully some will be downwards-pointing, like Bounce Rate.

So, you now know that you have increased traffic to your shop, how can you see where that traffic is coming from?

Scroll right down to Traffic Sources Overview and click 'View Report' Click the date range again to select the range you want, then click that second little button again to view the weeks results plotted on the graph rather than the days. Once you have had SEO in your shop a while, you can also view the graph as monthly results.

Scroll right down and click 'view report' for your referring site. This bit is so awesome, I love it. You're right in the very depth of Google Analytics now! You should now be able to see how many visitors have been directed to your shop from Google and over search engines, plus a load of other information that I have no idea about. I can see I got 747 visitors from Google (awesome!) 84 visitors from my blog (could do better!) and 1,717 direct visitors. Quite a few of those are probably me though.

*** At the same date range last year, I got 84 visitors from Google and 9 from my blog. 183 direct visitors.***

I could rabbit on all day about GA and the things you can find out there, but it takes a really good explore and poke round to really get to grips with!

I hope you have found some of the information that I have shared helpful! I'd love to hear your success stories, and please do feel free to share this information with anyone who can benefit from it

Katie x