Admittedly, I’m a bit of a stats junkie. I can’t get enough of those deliciously tasty tracking metrics to see how a site performs in the search engines, the blogosphere, the news, etc. If I could, I’d do like the NSA and record every conversation everywhere on the planet and audio scan for mentions of “SEOmoz” (update – the NSA has asked that I note that they do not record every conversation everywhere – apparently, Luxembourg is exempt 
).
However, this fine morning (2:30am Seattle time on Veteran’s Day), I’m wondering whether the rest of the search marketing community is as obsessive as I am. Thus, a poll!
I figured it’s only fair that since I mention these, I walk through how to track them and what they do.
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Inlink Data from Google’s Webmaster Tools & Yahoo! Site Explorer
The data above can be found by registering your site with Google’s Webmaster Tools and viewing the external links tab. Tracking it over time can be elating, depressing or confusing (just remember that sometimes, even Google has data glitches).
I pull additional data from Yahoo! Site Explorer on both links to the domain as a whole and links to particularly critical pages.
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Search Rankings for Specific Keywords
Rank checking is so 1999… I know, but I still do it sometimes, and since the SEOmoz Rank Checker remembers your old data, it’s cool to be able to chart progress on particularly important terms and pages.
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Brand/Domain Mentions in Search Engines
Retrieving brand mentions usually means running a search for your brand name at the engines and excluding your own site (or sites) to see how much web saturation you’ve got. For example, you can see in the above screen capture that SEOmoz has 1.2 million mentions in Yahoo!’s index, and this search – performancing -site:performancing.com – at Yahoo! shows about 1.73 million mentions. Note that I always like to go to the last page of results when checking results estimates numbers.
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Blog Links/Mentions
While the Google link command isn’t worth squat, the blogsearch link command works beautifully, and has great data and results. Tracking mentions over time is important, particularly for bloggers, because it can give you a sense of whether you’re accelerating or slowing down your growth and reach.
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Website Inclusion Data
A simple “site:domain.com” command works at all the engines except Ask.com (where you’ll need to use “domain site:domain.com”). Again, I’ll browse to the last page of results to get the most accurate data.
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PageRank from the Google Toolbar
Before the October PR update, we were a 7/10, after, we became 6/10 (no surprise since a few thousand sites that link to us lost a ton of PR due to selling links). Now, some datacenters are returning an 8/10 for our homepage – really? I don’t buy it. So, yes, tracking PR might be pretty useless, but admit it – we all do it, and even though we say it’s “worthless,” we’ll probably all keep doing it. For the tracking obsessed, even bad stats are better than no stats.
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News Mentions
Watching for your domain or brand name in news results can make for slim pickings unless you get mentioned often, but if you’re a moderate-sized or big brand, it’s good to have sense of not only how often, but how many positive v. negative news results you’ve got. Both Google & Yahoo! News are useful here, although Google tends to have a slightly larger index.
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Number of Visitor Referrals Sent via Search Engines
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Hopefully, almost everyone is tracking at least this data through your website’s analytics. It’s valuable stuff and can help you identify swings and trends that can influence your SEO efforts sitewide.
I’ll be interested to see the final results and would love to hear your thoughts in the comments on the value of these metrics and whether there might be others you watch as well.
