Now that you have your blog set up, you are going to want to track who’s coming to your site, where they’re coming from, and what they’re looking at.  Google has probably the greatest tracking program I have ever seen.  Anything you could ever want to know is incorporated into this program and it is called Google Analytics. rc26tnedxj

I could go on and on about all the features of Google Analytics but that would make this article go on to a small e-book.  I’ll show you how to easily set it up with your wordpress blog.

• Log in to your Google account, or signup if you haven’t already.  Visit the Google Analytics page Here.  If you haven’t signed up already you’ll be brought to a page that looks like this:

Google Analytics Signup Page

• Click Access Analytics to link your Google account with Analytics.  On the next page you’re brought to simply click on the Sign Up button to sign up for analytics.
• Next enter your information like below

Google Analytics Account

• Click Continue then enter your name, phone number, and country/territory.
• Click continue again and you’ll be brought to an agreement page, check the Yes, I agree to the terms checkbox
• click Create New Account.

You’ll be brought to a page that has your huge tracking code.  For us WordPress users we don’t have to worry about that because we’re going to be using something much simpler.  Simply click Finish and you’ll be brought to this page:

Google Analytics Code

The code circled in RED is the code we are going to be using.  So where are we going to put this code on our WordPress blog?  Well if you haven’t already done so download the Google Analytics for WordPress Plugin or search for it on your plugins dashboard.

Once you have downlaoded and installed this plugin visit the dashboard under Plugins > Google Analytics.

We have covered up our code for security purposes but you will enter your code in the area circled in red, and make sure that you place the tracking script in the footer.

Google Analytics Settings

Click Update Settings and your Google Analytics will now be activated!  it will take some time for the data to be processed and show up on your google analytics dashboard.  To access it simply go to your Google Dashboard and click on Analytics.  Click on Analytics and you’ll be brought to your Google Analytics Dashboard.  Here you can play around with all the settings and features and now you can see how great Google Analytics really is with the amount data it processes.

With this information you can now see where your traffic is coming from and what they are looking at.  With that you can then increase what’s working for you.  If you’ve been article marketing and its been driving crazy traffic then rinse and repeat.  If you’ve been social bookmarking with no effect at all then stop doing that and write more articles!  If you’re getting a high bounce rate for your home page maybe you should change it up to make it more appealing to your visitors.

That’s only the tip of the iceberg.  There are so many things you could do with analytics and if you’re trying to monetize your blog or bring in more traffic, not using analytics is leaving money and visitors on the table.

If you don’t already have a Google Webmaster Tools account, you need to do so and you can follow our guide Here on how to do so.  Once you have set up your account, go to your webmaster tools home page and click Submit Sitemap

Submit Sitemap

Also make sure that you have the plugin Google XML Sitemap Generator.  This will generate a sitemap of every page on your blog and it will create a new one automatically every time you update your blog.  This is an amazing plugin and it makes things incredibly easy.  With this plugin it will create a sitemap at http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

On the submit a sitemap page click on Submit a Sitemap and enter that address:

Submitting Sitemap

Your sitemap page will now look something like this:

Sitemap Submitted

Again this will take a little time to get the data in there.  You have now submitted every page of your blog to the Google search engine.  This will help get your pages indexed and ranked fast.

How to Make Blog

Setting up a Google Webmaster Tools account is very simple, and very crucial if you want to track your blog in the Google rankings. Submitting your site to Google also allows you to show Google exactly what pages you have by submitting your sitemap, but that will be discussed in another article. The information you receive when you sign up is crucial to calibrating your site to it’s fullest potential.

If you haven’t already, sign up for a Google account. Use this as your master account for all your blogging needs. With Google you can submit multiple sites to any of their services, so having a master account will be a very convenient thing for you.

Also if you’ve not downloaded Google XML Sitemaps Plugin you need to do so now. It is crucial that you submit your sitemap to Google so that every time you update your blog they will be directly notified. This greatly increased your chances of getting your blog indexed and ranked very quickly.

Once you have signed up for your master blogging account with Google, head over to their Google Webmaster Tools.  Once you are at this screen it will ask you to simply sign in with your account, and that’s all you’ll have to do.

Next it will show you a screen such as this:

Google Webmaster Tools

Click on Add a Site

Google WebTools Add a Site

You’ll then be asked to verify that you own the site, and this is a pretty simple process.  We suggest uploading an HTML file as editing your blogs templates could have terrible results if you mess anything up.

All you will need to do is log into your hosting account for your wordpress blog, go to file manager, and create a file named after whatever they have you name it.  Make sure you do this in the root directory upon which your wordpress is installed.

Once verified you will be taken to the Google Webmaster Tools homepage

Google Webmaster Tools Home

Take some time to explore this area and find out what everything does.  If your site is brand new you will likely not have any information available.  This can take some time to get there – weeks.  The more popular your site and the more people that visit, the more often to Google bots will crawl your page and update your information.

There is some great information in these tools.  You can see how many pages of your site are indexed, which pages are indexed, if you have links that are broken, what your top search queries are, all of your backlinks, and much more.

As an example, if you know what your top search queries are you can choose which ones would be reasonable to try and rank for.  If you find a keyword that you didn’t think of beforehand you can now target it and start building backlinks with that anchor text and perhaps put much better SEO on the page that has the keyword.

One thing you also MUST do is submit your sitemap to google, which we will be discussing in another post.  Until then, see you later!

How to Make Blog