Web Site Web Logs



"If you build it, they will come." That famous line from Field of Dreams proved true in the film, but, unfortunately, it doesn't apply to the Internet.

If you want people to visit your site, you have to make an effort to let them know it's there. Here are some ideas we've used successfully ourselves.

Understand & use your on-site traffic statistics We'll concentrate on how to maximize the ranking, the traffic, and even your sales.

         The web logs on your server are compiled as pure data, with nothing but compressed numbers & code that is unreadable by humans... Having the right server-side analysis software to read them with is critically important to understanding your traffic. For instance, AWStats, (among a few others) shows you all of the vital information we'll talk about below, while Webalizer, which is still quite popular, doesn't even tell you which Search Engines were used to find your site! If you are doing any kind of Search Engine Optimization, this is like running a marathon with no shoes. The really sad part about that scenario is that the data is there, recorded on your server either way... You just can't access it without a good web server log analyzer program.

         That's why we're including in our instructions here a process to ensure you are getting all the stats you need, and then at the end we'll address what to do with those numbers over time.

How to understand your web site traffic and use it to your advantage:

• Study the following chart. Everything in it is important to SEO, and you need to have access to all these statistics, updated daily or more often, in your host server control panel. Pay close attention to see if you are missing a few, because we will start by showing you a way to add the missing functionality on in the following steps.
  
  

  Vital information you need to know about your traffic for SEO:

  Where they came from: Referrers. From both Web pages and Search engines, with an active link to the page that the visited WebSite is currently listed in. - Preferably in the chronological order of occurrence with the times of visits.

  Which words they used to find you: Keywords. Used in Search Engines linking to a WebSite. Preferably both cumulative and daily viewing options, with one and two word phrases or better.

  Spider traffic: Indexing. Knowing when Googlebot, for instance, visits your site and how often is like knowing when your guests show up for dinner... Better clean house in time!

  Geotargeting: From where, by Countries and Cities. Where the visitors are physically located.

  Which Browsers, Operating systems, and versions of Javascript, flash, CSS etc. used by the visitors' browsers: Software versions. Very useful to conform your site's appearance to the masses.

  Graphical trends: Site statistics. Over a period of time, to measure patterns. The more reporting, the better.

  Interest determination: Exit pages. Knowing which page your surfers depart your website from is invaluable for planning your site upgrades. If there is a large amount of traffic departure from a certain page, then you simply have to make that page more interesting to keep them on your site.

  Users, NOT hits: Unique Views. It's hard to believe, but many older server hosts only show the number of hits, and not the number of actual, unique users on your website. These days this is easily done by filtering hits with the IP addresses logged, and the difference in numbers is staggering.

  Security: IP tracking. As long as you need IPs logged, you should be aware of who went where. At the very least this is a good security habit, and at best it can be used to spot trends.

  Customized Analysis: Site searches. Allowing for keyword query searches to customize information on visitors and traffic.

  
  
  
  
• If your current server host can show you all of those site stats, then you are doing great, and you can proceed down towards the bottom of the page. Most people who have followed our instructions at all in the Hosting choice section, will probably have AWStats right now, so I will use this step to direct them 'the rest of the way in,' as well as telling the rest of you how to proceed. A recent build version of AWStats should be able to show you everything we've talked about in the chart above except your on-site searching. For that, we recommend that you download and install another great, free program:
  
  
  • Zoom Site Search (1.03 MB download for windows)
    Zoom is a powerful, professional-looking, full-site-spidering search engine for your website that gives you actual charts & graphs based on your on-site searches... For instance, if you saw that people were constantly searching for something that you don't offer on your site, then you could add a page for that subject. ION has used AWStats and Zoom together, and we've never before or since had such great statistical data for free.
  
  
  
• For those who want more data than these two programs together can offer, there are other choices that I know of; upgrading your host server to one that uses Urchin Statistics or Smarter Stats. Unfortunately if you've signed up with another host recently it can be hard to switch, but we did try to warn you.
  
  
• If you didn't get Urchin, Smarter Stats, or even AWStats in the first place, you are probably missing some combination of Keyword stats, referrers, and/or exit pages... Really important things for SEO. If this is your problem, you're still in luck, because here is a software package called Relax (always good advice) that examines your server logs on your PC and can answer those question for you. It's not a full web log analyzer, just a suppliment to the many web log analyzers out there that don't offer enough stats for us keyword optimizers.
  
  
• Still missing any important statistics? Try looking for your solution on our Web Log Analyzer Tools page. It's got all the best free tools we know of, big and small alike.
  
  
• Ok, so you've got all the statistics you could ever need. Now what? As you complete the other steps in our program, all of these numbers here should rise. Make sure they all keep rising, and check back here often to see what is not rising as quickly as the others. Exit pages are especially sensitive... If you notice that one page in particular is being used as the exit page to your site more often than most of the others, then it may need a sprucing to make it more interesting. The bottom line? Try to keep all your visitors on your site as long as possible, and try to get them to exit from the pages you want them to only. Your stats will be your scorekeeper, so get in the game and direct those surfers where you want them to go!
  
  Every statistic mentioned in the chart above can be used to improve your website's traffic and/or sales. Think of each one of these reports as your trusted advisors, all suggesting that you do something to 'tweak' the process and make it better. For example, the local-site search results show you that 10% of your visitors searched for "bananas foster" on your cooking website last month, but you don't even offer that receipe... So add it! That's a loud-and-clear suggestion on how to improve your site to be what your visitors are looking for. The same with languages, browser Versions, operating systems, etc. The more you know, the better you can cater to your visitors needs, and in the end that means better sales.
  
  

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Why your knowing your traffic is important in SEO

These statistics are all now important to know for your site's continued traffic health. Take a look at your website's control panel or existing log analysis software before you proceed, to make sure that you have access to all of the stats mentioned above. If your software or host control panel doesn't give you enough information, consider one of the free server-side or client-side tools listed below. You don't have to get the very best, you just have to make sure that you can see (and maybe run reports on) all those stats above.

Want a deeper look at your website traffic than your host server offers? Here are some great, free applications for you to analyze your existing site statistics and logs with. If you don't know how traffic is behaving across your website, you will never know how to increase it!


As your efforts to turn your traffic into profit grows, so does the need to know exactly what your surfers are doing across your whole website. Some hosting services tell you enough about your traffic for you to never even need to view your logs, but that is still pretty rare.

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There's a continual recognition gap among many marketing professionals when it comes to their websites and understanding the accountability and value search marketing provides. Without a doubt, marketers tend to have a solid "forest view" of search. It's the "tree-level view" they often have difficulty seeing.

What happens then to the marketer charged with proving the success of search engine optimization when a company has been focused on its tree farm and not concerned with actually counting the lumber produced by that farm?

In a perfect scenario, online success is measured by conversions or the number of desired actions taken by visitors to a site – such as a sale, a contact us form, a newsletter sign-up, a white paper download, etc. However, many web analytic programs are not capable of measuring conversions. And, if the company's back-end system is indeed capturing conversion data, it often is impossible to marry this data to search activity.

Perhaps you are saddled with a basic analytics package, one that can measure a lot of site statistics, but usually not conversions. Zero conversion data, now what? How do you demonstrate the value of SEO? You can always produce the standard ranking reports with the growth in rankings and the number of visitors referred by search engines. That's fine – visibility for targeted keywords and increases in search-generated traffic are always good to show, but you're still lacking data showing a visitor did something you wanted them to do.

So when lacking conversion data, you need to produce evidence demonstrating a basic premise of SEO – an ability to drive quality traffic to a website. The majority of basic analytic programs provide much of what you need, and coupled with some basic math can easily produce information that authenticates increases in traffic quality.

To document the key performance indicators (KPIs) for visitation quality, you'll need to track:

Average Time on Site: The longer visitors are on a site, the more engaged they are with the content. This KPI is usually a standard measurement within most analytics programs and should trend upward before stabilizing when compared to levels before site optimization.

Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of visitors who arrive at an entry page, then leave without getting any deeper into a site. These are "one page only" visitors and this is a measure that generally indicates a visitor did not find the content relevant. Some analytic programs specifically report this stat. For those that don't, you can often find a report within the program called "Number of Page Views per Visitor." Since these visitors had only one page view, you can calculate the bounce rate by dividing the number of these one page only visitors by the total number of visitors (e.g., a site with 1,000 visitors during a month that had 400 one page only visitors produces a 40% bounce rate). Compared to pre-optimization, this KPI should trend downward before stabilizing.

Visitors with 2+ Page Views: These are the visitors who arrive at an entry page and progress to at least one additional page on the site – this is the opposite view of Bounce Rate. These visitors were interested in your content enough to explore more than one page, indicating qualified traffic. Using the example above, 600 visitors had two or more page views and represented 60% of total traffic. Compared to pre-optimization, this KPI should trend upward before stabilizing.

Average Page Views per Visitors with 2+ Page Views: More telling than an overall Average Page Views number, this measurement shows average page views among those who actually delved into the site. To calculate this figure, subtract the number of one page only views from the total page views (e.g., a site with 4,000 total page views that also had 400 one page only views would end up with 3,600 views generated from visitor sessions with 2+ pages viewed). Once you have this number, divide it by the number of visitors with 2+ page views. Using our previous examples, we'd divide 3,600 by 600 (2+ total page views divided by 600 visitors with two or more page views) to arrive at a 6.0 average. Compared to pre-optimization, this KPI should trend upward before stabilizing.

Entry Page: The majority of any site's traffic will always come through the home page. However, by dispersing your targeted keywords throughout your site, an optimized site should land visitors deeper and closer to the content visitors are seeking. Tracking this KPI should focus on following the percentage of home page entries which should trend downward before stabilizing when compared to pre-optimization levels, demonstrating the increased visibility of the site for multiple terms within the search engine results pages.

By tracking these "visitor quality" KPIs and comparing pre- and post-optimization results, you should easily be able to prove the value of SEO to your senior management (or client) who hasn't quite had that "a-ha" conversion epiphany. Who knows, they might just catch conversion fever and fork over for a comprehensive web analytics program!

By Matt Williams We Will Help You
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