Web Analytics vs. SEO - Who will reign supreme?

Ok, this comes up often enough at work and I was wondering how people handle it.

When you have links coming back to your site, you can track things or you can improve your SEO with extra linkbacks.

The argument is do you:
A) Track everything so you know what's going on and can segment your traffic
B) Enjoy an SEO bump with a link to a non-duplicated page

Now, here we've already established that Paid Search and Banners are ok - spiders aren't really going to hit those. Until today I figured email was fine too, since obviously a google spider will not be browsing my inbox. There's a little internal debate about the fact that if people post the link in their email somewhere, that's going to dilute SEO efforts, but that leaves me with 3 thoughts:

1) No one's going to post that link. Maybe they'll forward the email with the link, but posting?
2) if they do post it, even the few that do, does it really have an seo impact? Does it lower our overall rank or does it just dilute any gains this effort would have?
3) And even if it does have a very minor impact, is it worth completely being in the dark on a major email campaign?

I'm trying to scope it into a benefit vs damage ratio. Like if SEO only benefits a 1 (out of 10) and Measurement efforts are damaged 10/10, then it's a .1, which stinks. If Measurement benefits a 10 but SEO is damaged a 10, then it's a 1, which isn't very good either. If Measurement benefits a 10 and SEO is only damaged a 1, then we've got a 10:1 ratio, which is nice.

Just wondering how people handle this little tug of war in their lines of work.

Welcome

It's February 2, 2009. Pretty much a year since my last post in a different blog bryanalytics.blogspot.com, but I decided to start a new one. Why? Well, Web Analyst is kind of weak sounding. Web Metrics analyst isn't very flashy and could get people thinking that I say "how many hits a website has" or something that's very worthless.

So this started as an amusing response to people I used to work with that called a task of theirs "Digital Anthropology." I said I was a "Digital Archaeologist" because, in a sense, I look at a "site" that has remnants of human interaction, artifacts, traces of activity, and I try to make sense of what they did and how they thought.

Makes sense, right? Digital was too broad, though, since everything is digital. Even our thoughts! Well, maybe not quite that far yet (no offense to robots and cyborgs), but pretty much everything is digital. And since everything is digital, saying I track digital things is not completely accurate. My focus is mainly on the web.

Is web still an accurate and accepted word, or is it slang that makes you sound out of touch and foolish? It's the first word in the Web Analytics Association, for one. People still have it in their job titles to make sure they're known as web folks, not just standard everyday analysts. Or is it more like cyber,which is a lame and mostly embarrassing word that old people use to sound cooler and more in the know than they actually are?

I went with the first: That it's still ok and accepted. So why web archaeology and not just web analyst? Because I do so much more than simply analyze. Sometimes I spend time thinking about what I should be looking for. Theories, if you will. Or I'm developing the tools that will make excavation more efficient. Or I'm refining methods to look at the information. I'm building scenarios, I'm developing what-ifs for specific patterns of behavior. And then, after all that, I'm going to analyze the information - if I have time. I'll be honest in saying that developing the plan and tools is, to me, far more enjoyable, but I could never be satisfied if I never did any of the analysis. But if I couldn't think about new ways to gather information and help people who are a little more narrowly focused on a specific set of data I would also be unfulfilled.

So here's where I'll post my thoughts, ramblings, and other possibly unfocused ponderings about web archaeology and my attempt to try and figure out just what the hell people are doing on our sites.

My current plans involve truly understanding the organic search visitor. What did they do, for how long, what words influenced what behavior, and finally, should we change the entire design of our site to cater to this highly specific, highly profitable, and very critical segment? Perhaps, but that's the question I'm trying to answer.