How do you keep a record of your onsite SEO changes

[mcliddy]

Hi Everyone,

I'm new to the whole SEO process, so was wondering if anyone can help me.

I want to keep a record of all SEO activities in one place for the website i'm trying to optimise for.

I have created an excel sheet which have the follwoing tabs

-Overview & Rankings
 - Keyword Research

• Competitior Analysis
   - Keyword Distribution Map
• Onpage SEO
• Link Ideas
• Link Research
  -Link Building Log
   - PPC Campaign

Does this all seem correct?
Could anyone help in telling me what process you do to keep a record of all SEO onsite activity?

I hope this isn't a  stupid post, but help would be very much appreciated

Many Thanks

Matt

[Laurean]

We use excel. It's a bit old school, even though I have an Access certification and could prob dev something sexier. It's easier for sharing with clients and no training is needed. It's easy to let it get overwhelming, so we oly keep the key metrics that matter. On page updates, link building activity, and ranking results. It's let's us see enough info over time for us and our clients. Also is a good place to store all those passwords!

[EGOL]

I think that an SEO log should look like a log for a science experiment....

I did xxx because I thought it would result in yyyy.   Two weeks later here is what happened.  Four weeks later here is what happened.

The main value of an SEO log is to learn from the changes that you make on your site and how those changes influenced your rankings, conversion rate, etc.

[Maxxum]

I use Excel as well. However, I try not to keep all the elements in one excel file.

I have a file for rankings another for link building etc. It's way simpler and it doesn't take 1 minute to save the file.

Having just one file can be somewhat confusing. Moreover if you loose your file, you loose eerything.

[stefanok]

Just like Alan,

I use excel but it also gets a bit hard over tome with rows and rows of data being collected.

I ike to keep each section tabbed and this allows me to track things far easier.

Old school rocks

[SEObleu.com]

iPad 2 notes...honestly...

[AlanBleiweiss]

Hi Matt

I used to use Excel, but it can get out of hand over time.  Personally, I prefer a project management system, such as Basecamp.  You can set up milestone actions with a date of delivery, that becomes the date of record of completion.  You can add to-do lists, files, notes, messages all tied to the milestone.  Everything is then stored and can be archived for future retrieval.

It's not perfect, (no solution I've ever used is perfect), but it's much more organized and manageable than Excel, unless you are really skilled at Excel and have the patience and willingness to deal with it when it's got years worth of data.