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Turner Dow Search Engine Optimisation |
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Most host companies provide good web statistics that help us analyse where our traffic is coming from, how much trafic we have, and more importantly, where the traffic is not coming from but should. With many plates spinning, it's easy to neglect the needed statistical analysis. The data tell us much about the health of our site. Lets take the most common statistical package provided through cpanel. Awstats is great, but Webalizer is the most common used package. For Webalizer - select a month to see much data about the domain.  The stats are interesting and give us an idea of the health of the site - but for SEO we need to look mainly at the less popular headings. Start with 'Hits by Respone Code'. Codes 401 and 404 show us that hits were attempted for pages that were either 'Unauthorised' or 'Not Found'. We need to track those calls down and fix them - they certainly influence the successul SEM for the site but also affect what we would prefer a search engine to see and index. Next: URL's accessed  The above image is another item of interest in the stats - the main URL's accessed in the period and even more importantly the URL's that were the entry pages for the site. Cpanel also has a table showing the exit pages for the site. Taking each of these tables and noting the important URL's may tell us which pages are the most important to optimise and which pages we would like to have accessed more frequently as entry pages or subsequently accessed pages need to be looked at and internally optimised to bring greater access success. Next: Referrers  The above screen dump is reduced to the point that the URL's aren't clear - which is intended, but this part of Webalizer shows the referrer - i.e. the site the user was on before they came here - or the site that sent them here. Oddly this table generally also demonstrates the general pecking order of search engines, the main referrer besides other internal pages is Google followed by Yahoo followed by MSN. Pay attention to whoch sites the user came from. You may well see that sites you have a key link on sends traffic to you and sites that you imagined a key link to be on is not quite as key as you thought or as they claim. Traffic coming from key sites need to be coddled and if possible the link made more prominent. In this table, also look for sites such as Froogle or Base for the effectiveness of the listing. Next: Key phrases used  The final screen shot we show is the phrases use to access the site - those that successfully resulted in searches that gave us site visits. We have to balance this with our PPC campaign - it could well represent our PPC campaign success - we have to subtract the hits we can read from our PPC consoles. But here we see how people are getting to our site and which phrases we are missing out on - so all valuable information for a search engine optimisation campaign. Other tables in cpanel show the browsers used by visitors and the geographical distribution of visitors (we noted for one of our clients that the geographical distribution of visitors was such that many visitors had no option for selecting a shipping charge - this was fixed and the company now enjoys significant business from non-domestic sources). Dry though it seems, analysis of statistics may differentiate success from failure, and also often differentiates the good SEO companies from the sub optimal companies. Don't neglect what is provided from host companies as part of your package - statistics are the health metric of search engine optimisation. Further Reading: Understanding Stats | Google Analytics from Google | ||||
 Search Engine Optimisation -- Turner Dow -- There's Only One High Street Now SEO House - 9 Silverdale - Wembdon - Somerset - TA6 7PT Tel.01278 426100 - Email: info@turnerdow.com |
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Using Statistics