Best way to calculate seo performance in website

What is an effective way to calculate SEO performance in the website?

[Ann4SEO]

Hello,

I am doing SEO for one my client for last few years. Earlier we used to calculate the site performance via hits in the website. I know its not the effective way to calculate the site performance.

Now the client wanted to change it to the visits referred by search engines. I told them that it’s not a effective way to calculate SEO performance in the website as we do lots of other task like directory submission etc to get the rankings. So what about the traffic from those referring websites. They understood but we are not getting any effective way to calculate the SEO performance in the website.

Here's what I want from my SEO expert friends advice. Please tell me what is the best or an effective way to calculate SEO performance in the website.

Thanks & Regards -- Ann

[phranque]

the only way to measure performance is to implement some analytics for your site.
you should also decide what you want to measure.
there is no single measure of performance for a web site.
you can analyze visits, visitors, new visitors, returning visitors, page views, etc.
some metrics measure the performance of a url as opposed to a domain.

i should also point out the the "SE" part of "SEO" means "Search Engine", so "calculating SEO performance" usually means measuring traffic that was referred from organic search results, as opposed to referred from other sites (including directories), paid clicks, direct type in traffic, etc.
all of which should be measured and analyzed...