Unit 9: SEO for Blogs and Google Analytics Integration

Introduction:

You are now going to focus on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that concerns blogs specifically. Most blogging software is already well written to accommodate SEO considerations, but WordPress, in particular, has quite exceptional SEO capabilities. In addition, WordPress has plug-ins that boost up SEO even further.

This website provides the Ultimate WordPress SEO Step-by-step Guide for Beginners. You don't necessarily need to read it now, but you might want to bookmark it. This can be one of your best resources on how to make WordPress more friendly for search engines.

The insights you gain from the traffic on your website can provide invaluable information on how many visitors you receive, which pages receive the most traffic, and so on. This website reviews Five Powerful Analytics and Statistics Plugins for WordPress. After reviewing that website, you may decide that one analytics plug-in is better than another. After you finish the course, feel free to experiment with any of the other Analytics plug-ins and choose the one that works best for you. It really comes down to preference, but for the purposes of this course material, please set up Google Analytics.

Google Analytics (GA) is an important tool that helps you make sense of the results of your SEO efforts by tracking visits, exit pages, traffic increases and decreases, inbound links, etc.

Visit the Google Marketing Platform web page and take a tour of the home page. Then visit the Google Analytics page accessed further down on the main page, and take a tour of the home page. Finally, visit the Features Page and explore some of the features of Google Analytics.

Every website should have GA installed. There are several ways to integrate GA:

1. Add the tracking code just before the </head> tag in header.php.
2. Select a theme that already has an interface to paste the code.
3. Install a plug-in to take GA to new heights.

Here is a good place to learn how to get started using Google Analytics.

You can install a plug-in that will take Google Analytics integration to the next level.
Read the plugin homepage for "Google Analytics by MonsterInsights" to see the power of some of the things it can accomplish.