Analytics and SEO deserve to play an integral role in the development and planning of any site or community you launch. Why should you pay attention to these things? You’re probably more interested in encouraging your community than in working with backend tactics for trying to make your site hit the first page of Google. Maybe there aren’t so many artistic reasons for improving your SEO and analytics but I can absolutely guarantee you that these two little words will play a significant role in your success. What are the chances that somebody else is producing a site similar to yours? Pretty darn good. If you can’t find any competition right now, you’d better believe that if/when you become successful, you’re going to find yourself in competition soon afterward. If you haven’t thought about your analytics or SEO, your competitor will.

How will SEO and Analytics Help My BuddyPress Site?

1. Get Found.

The vast majority of web traffic is driven by search engines. If you want a piece of that pie you need to be able to be found. Initiating an SEO plan and analytics on your BuddyPress site will help you to get found and known before the explosion of BuddyPress that we expect in 2010.

2. Make Money.

If you expect to monetize your BuddyPress site with advertising, you’re going to need to have some kind of analytics in place to demonstrate the traffic you’e getting. Your ability to bring traffic to your website will be directly proportionate to the profits you make from your BuddyPress community.

3. Get your secondary pages, groups and profile pages indexed.

This will enable you to command higher quality traffic to your website. Your unique visits will be more likely to result in conversions and loyal visitors because they arrived at your site based on content they were already looking for.

4. Find out where your traffic is coming from.

If you know the largest sources of your traffic, it is easier shape your community and target your content to the sources that are making you successful.

5. Increase the number of members in your BuddyPress community.

A greater number of people visiting your site will more than likely result in increased membership conversion rates, especially if they find high quality content that they cannot access without an account at your website. BuddyPress SEO and analytics will help you to craft strategies and goals for increasing your membership as well as to target what drives people away from your site.

6. Stay competitive.

The numbers of pages being indexed by search engines are increasing exponentially year after year. Therefore, the top spots in search engine results are becoming extremely competitive, even within what you may believe is a relatively small niche. If you want to remain competitive, you will need to have an SEO action plan in place. All of these reasons listed will help to contribute to branding and name recognition, which will enhance the value of your website to consumers, advertisers, and other sites linking to you.

Site Traffic Tools for BuddyPress

Two exciting new plugins are now available in the BuddyPress plugin repository. Though these are the first of their kind, we expect to see a great many plugins popping up for BuddyPress site traffic as the community continues to expand. Here are the basics to help you get your BuddyPress SEO and analytics off the ground:

BuddyPress Analytics Plugin

This plugin will allow you to use your analytics script with your buddypress site. It supports any analytics script including but not limited to Google Analytics.
Download Here

BuddyPress SEO Plugin

This plugin gives you the possibility to enter title, description and keywords for the main blog, the user blogs and the BuddyPress pages, including the directory view of groups, members, blogs, forums, and events.
Download Here