How effective is your Web site? Free online tools help measure site success.

How effective is your Web site? Free online tools help measure site success. Greenville County Schools, South Carolina's largest publicschool system with 79 schools and 65,000 students, is committed toregularly updating its online resources. And each year SuperintendentPhinnize Fisher chooses top sites from among the district. This year,she named those of Mauldin and Heritage Elementary Schools Heritage Elementary is a public elementary school in Prince George, British Columbia part of School District 57 Prince George. , HillcrestMiddle School Hillcrest Middle School in Coquitlam, British Columbia is a middle school.It is located at 2161 Regan Avenue. As of 2006, the current school principal is Rob Zambrano, and the vice-principal isnot Sean Della Vedova.This school also has two bands. and Eastside High School Eastside High School or East Side High School can refer to: Eastside High School (Gainesville, Florida) Eastside High School (Covington, Georgia) Eastside High School (Paterson, New Jersey) Eastside High School (Taylors, South Carolina) as Best of the Web 2006."The Web is a terrific way to tell our community of the good workthat happens every day in our classrooms," Fisher says. While K-12 schools across the nation have Web sites, and countlesseducation-related applications have been developed for students, staff,parents and the community, building effective Web sites is more thanrunning online pages up virtual flagpoles. Even the best content isworthless if no one knows it exists, so promoting sites and measuringsuccess are as important as development. But schools fail in thisregard. Fortunately, there are free online tools you can use to bringthese dimensions to your district. Tracking Stats At the simplest level, many schools have inserted counters on theirhome pages to monitor traffic coming to the site. For example,Greenville's Hillcrest Middle School uses Site Meter Site Meter is a service which provides counter and tracking information for Web sites. By logging IP addresses and using JavaScript or HTML to track visitor information, Site Meter provides Web site owners with information about their visitors, including how they reached the site, to tracknumbers of daily visitors, total page views, time online, entry and exitpages, and user locations that recently included Canada, China andIndia. Visit the Hillcrest home page through the district site and clickon the Site Meter button to see sample data. Another valuable statistic is how your site ranks with otherdistricts and with other Web pages, according to according toprep.1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians.2. In keeping with: according to instructions.3. the amount of traffic.For example, if you use Alexa to search on the term "schooldistrict," and click on "site info" buttons next to eachsite, you will see its traffic rank--lower means more active--and numberof links. To illustrate, the Poway Unified School District Poway Unified School District is a school district located in Poway, California. The District operates 22 elementary schools (K-5), six middle schools (6-8), four comprehensive high schools (9-12), and one continuation high school. in Californiaranks less than 3,000 among sites on the Web, which is extremely busy,and receives links from some 400 other sites. Check the stats on yourdistrict by using Alexa to search on your Web address. But the most sophisticated data analysis tool by far is GoogleAnalytics Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that a webmaster can optimize his/her AdWords advertisement and marketing campaigns through the use of GA's analysis of where the , which shows in great detail how visitors found your site andhow they interact with it. The tool displays data in graphs, so you cansee the changes over time, including daily page views, time spentonline, and the numbers of new and returning visitors. Raising Ranks Search engines index and rank sites using robot programs calledspiders and crawlers, and a variety of methods. These include noting theplacement of keywords in titles and near the top of pages, and"metatag See meta tag. " content words supplied by developers. Search EngineWatch Search Engine Watch (SEW) is a website that provides news and information about search engines and search engine marketing. [1]Search Engine Watch was started by Danny Sullivan in 1996. will help you organize and submit your sites to engines so theyrank as high as possible, and you should try sample searches to see howyour district's sites fare. For example, since a major factor inranking is how many other sites link to yours, it is always helpful tocross-link your pages with other school and community sites. You can seethe links to your site through LinkPopularity, and by searching on theword link: followed by the address of your site (e.g. link:www.greenville.k12. sc.us). Online measurement tools can help you judgethe success of your site, and make this your best online year ever. RESOURCES Greenville County Schools www.greenville.k12.sc.us Site Meter www.sitemeter.ccm Alexa www.alexa.com Google Analytics www.google.com/analytics Search Engine Watch searchenginewatch.com LinkPopularity.com www.linkpopularity.com Odvard Egil Dyrli, dyrli@uconn.edu, is senior editor and emeritus e��mer��i��tus?adj.Retired but retaining an honorary title corresponding to that held immediately before retirement: a professor emeritus.n. pl. professor of education at the University of Connecticut The University of Connecticut is the State of Connecticut's land-grant university. It was founded in 1881 and serves more than 27,000 students on its six campuses, including more than 9,000 graduate students in multiple programs.UConn's main campus is in Storrs, Connecticut. .