Use Google Search to Track Your Tutorial Usage

You just can't hide from Google! I told you there is an answer to the question,

How will I know who has grabbed my button?

My post about turning your button into a free billboard, recommended you place a unique search term in the image 'Alt=' attribute, like "BWS tips button." Google will index those words whenever it crawls any blogs that display your button image! A Google search for those keywords can let you know exactly which blogs are displaying your button.

How to setup the tracking keywords

The 'alt=' attribute is part of any image you add to your site. Normally the alt value is blank, but you should always add a description. The tag stands for "alternative text." If the image fails to load, visitors see the alt value instead.  For SEO purposes, the alt value can help bring new visitors just from the image indexing.

The code for our grab button uses this alt value:

How to Search for results

1. Use Google search
   Use google.com to key in the unique keywords "BWS tips button"  or whatever you are using for your tracking. Press 'go' to get search results.
   The words must be in quotes to find what you want!
2. Use Google alert
   You can also set up a Google Alert and get e-mail alerts whenever someone grabs your button.  An alert is simply the relevant Google results based on the parameters you set (see box below). Actually, you see the same results as the Google search, but the email lists only the current time period.

   

BWS Results

Our search for "BWS tips button" returned 8 pages. Most of them are not displaying our button image and may not have left a comment on the post but I can tell they used the tutorial code.  That's a good thing, since we want our efforts to be useful. Apparently, they copied the code, changed to their image and blog urls but forgot to change the Alt words!

So as a public service announcement, these folks need to change their grab box code:

See the full list here --- Results 1 to 73 for "bws tips button" (opens in new window.)

Summary

This tracking works only if the visitor copies tutorial code/html that contains the unique keywords ensuring a Google index.  That's very easy with any grab my button scrollbox. But you can embed other words that you want to track within the html that is copied by the reader. For a Blogger Table of  Contents tutorial, I gave everyone a paragraph to use, explaining to their visitors how their new table works. When I search on those words, I see who has installed my code!

Normally, post comments are the only way you know someone will use your tutorial code. However, for those shy visitors we now have a tracking tool in our arsenal for the new question:

How will I know who has grabbed my tutorial?

Armed with that list, we can start visiting blogs and making contact. You can't escape now.