Using Your Website Report Card

Your website Report Card is at the heart of the Virteom success system. It's your go-to report for the health of your website, its SEO, and the leads it generates. The Report Card is chock full of information, so it's a good idea to review it on a regular basis (monthly, at a minimum) and make sure you understand what the data means and how you can improve your scores.

You can also get a 1000-foot view simply by looking at the Health Meter for your website. This number is a proprietary calculation that looks at content, SEO and website traffic to give you a general feeling about the site's health. Your goal is 100% health, but the higher the number the better.

You can view the Health Meter for your site by clicking the "Manager" link in the Virteom toolbar. Access to the Report Card is just to the right. Click the Report Card icon to view the "Website Report Card and Optimization Suggestions" screen.

The Report Card is broken up into several sections, including:

• Traffic analytic data
• SEO checkpoints
• Suggested density words
• Possible leads
• Traffic sources
• Developer awareness data

Traffic Analytic Data

The first area of the website Report Card shows information gleaned via Google Analytics and is designed to give you a quick and useful view into the amount of traffic coming to your site and what they do once there.

By default, the numbers are reflective of the most recent 30 days and include a comparison (the blue line on the graph) to the 30 days prior to that. However, you can use the date selection fields to change these ranges. The previous period will always reflect the same number of days as the current period. 

Hover your mouse over any point or line on the graph, and the corresponding number for that day will appear. To see the total (or average, depending on the selected data point) for the time period, view the line just above the graph.

When you first access your Report Card, this graph will reflect the number of visits. However, there are additional data points that can be reported. Just click the link just below the date fields to see the data of interest. The possible data points and their definitions* include:

• Visits: A group of interactions by a single visitor that take place on your website within a given time frame. For example a single visit can contain multiple page views and multiple transactions within a few minutes, seconds or hours. A visit ends when the visitor either exits your site, is inactive on your site for more than 30 minutes (or a different length specified in your Analytics setup), or at midnight. For more information, see this page from Google Analytics help.
• Bounces: A single interaction with your website followed by an exit within the specified visit length (usually 30 minutes).
• Views: An instance of a page being loaded by a browser. The Pageviews metric is the total number of pages viewed; repeated views of a single page are also counted
• Time: The length of time the average visitor spent on the site per visit, reported in "minutes.seconds". This is calculated by totaling the time on page for each page in each vist (except for the last page in the visits) then divided by the number of sessions for the selected time frame. For more information, see this page for Google Analytics help.
• Unique: This data point is designed to come as close as possible to tracking actual distinct visitors to your website. This is done by using a cookie to identify a browser on a particular computer as a single visitor. It is not able to identify a visitor who uses different browsers, multiple visitors who share a browser, or visitors who clear out or disable cookies.
• Adwords: The number of clicks received by your AdWords ads, leading visitors to your site. Note that these visitors are also counted in the other data points such as Visits and Unique Visitors.

You may also click the "Show Google Analytics Overview " link to see additional summary data. In this view, the totals of the above metrics (plus a few additional metrics) are shown along with the totals from the previous period and a red or green arrow to indicate an improvement or decline. This link is a toggle, so click it again to hide the information.

SEO Checkpoints

This area of the Report Card looks at five key areas for search engine optimization and provides a status for each. Your goal is to see the green star icon for each checkpoint, indicating that your optimization work is complete for that item. Keep in mind, however, that as you add and edit content and pages on your site, these numbers will constantly fluctuate. As a result, it is common (although not ideal) for users to have one or more areas that need further SEO work.

Each checkpoint is scanned periodically, but if you'd like to force a re-scan while logged into Virteom, click the refresh icon to the left of the metric.

The five key checkpoints are:

• Word Count: In order to have enough content to optimize without "stuffing" keywords, it's recommended that each content page on your site have at least 250 words of body copy. This metric indicates how many pages are found on your site and the percentage of them that have at least 250 words. To optimize for this checkpoint, click the red exclamation point for the metric to see a list of pages that need more content, then click a page name to edit its content.
• Meta Data: Meta data are tags in the HTML code of each webpage that indicate the Title, Description and Keywords for the page. The Title tag is used in the title bar of the web browser, and the Description is sometimes used in the results listed in a search engine. While the Keyword tag is not as important as it once was, some search engines still use it, so it's important to complete it with the most relevant keywords for the page. To optimize for this checkpoint, click the red exclamation point for the metric to see a list of pages without meta data. Then click the page name to access the page and its left-hand slider.
• Alt Attributes: Whenever an image is used on your site, an "Alt Tag" should be specified for it. The Alt Tag is a textual description of the image which is useful for SEO, valid HTML, and handicap accessibility (since it is used by screen readers). To optimize for this checkpoint, click the red exclamation point for the metric to see a list of pages without meta data. Click the page name to access the page, then right-click the image and choose Image Properties.
• Broken Links: This metric counts the number of links on the site that go to invalid locations, whether on your site or an external site. To optimize for this checkpoint, click the red exclamation point for the metric to see a list of pages with broken links. Click the page name to edit the page, then right-click the link and choose Edit Link.
• Page Rankings: The rankings you provide for each page on your website are used in creating the site's XML sitemap, which is fed to search engines as a means of making the engine aware of every page on your site. The rankings indicate the importance of each page and how often you plan to change its content. Every page should have its rankings entered. To optimize for this checkpoint, click the red exclamation point for the metric to see a list of pages without page rankings. Click the page name to access the page and it's left-hand slider.

Suggested Density Words

Keywords are words or phrases that appear frequently in your site's content. Search engines believe these describe or are relevant to the subject matter of your site and use this information in determining when your site should appear in search results. 

Virteom takes information from your Google Analytics account to find the keywords that people are already using to find your site, then analyzes them against a proprietary algorithm to determine which are the most effective at getting visitors to stay and engage with your site. The effective keywords are listed in this section with the most effective first. We suggest you further optimize your content and back-links with a focus on these keywords. 

Possible Leads

Virteom uses data from a variety of sources to help identify the visitors who are coming to your website. While we cannot provide an individual's name, we can often provide the name of the company they work for or are visiting from. Using a proprietary algorithm that factors in number of visits, time on site, and other elements, we rank these visitors according to the most likely lead. This information may be used to complement and help prioritize the Daily Lead Reports.

Traffic Sources

Using data from Google Analytics, this section summarizes the most important sources of visitors for you. It looks at the websites that visitors have accessed just before accessing yours and ranks them in order of importance. When the traffic source is a search engine, it is a good idea to optimize your site according to that engine's algorithmic rules. When it is another website, you may want to consider buying ads there, optimizing your link there, or searching for other bank link opportunities on similar sites.

Developer Awareness Data

This data point is generally used by web developers when testing or optimizing your website for a particular hardware/software configuration. It indicates the screen resolutions, operating systems, and browsers that were used most frequently by visitors accessing your site. 

* Since Traffic Analytic Data is pulled from Google Analyitics, we have used their definitions for the the data points tracked.