Since the nature of what SEO practitioners do is not clear to many people, the expert practitioner knows how important it is to establish quantifiable goals and demonstrate results. Expectation management is key, and effective communication of timetables for deliverables and improvements is crucial to the success of any SEO project.

Web analytics and other data-mining tools can provide a rich array of data that is invaluable to the SEO process. This includes tools for discovering new links, finding long tail search terms, determining the best links your competitors’ sites have, and more. All in all, a strong understanding of these tools will make you a better SEO practitioner.

However, thousands of tools are available, and it can be difficult to figure out which ones you need to use, which ones are merely nice to have, and which ones are not worth the time. It is a good idea to start simple and focus on what you need to establish a baseline measurement of where you are before you begin your SEO efforts and how to measure the results.

In other words, you need to measure whether you have been successful, and then get a sense as to how successful. The first thing you need to do is define why the site exists. Here are some possibilities:

These are all valid objectives that relate directly to the business. Missing from this list are things such as measuring rankings, measuring the total number of links, and measuring the average cost per acquired link (organically obtained links still have a cost: the cost of the marketing campaign to get them). These other measurements may be interesting, but they are not the end goal.

Closely connected with this are direct drivers of results. These include parameters such as:

The mechanics of measuring results in terms of the main business goal should always be the first set of measurements you put in place. From there you can diverge and look at other metrics that might help you diagnose problems with the site or give you additional insight into how to set up a campaign.