- Keyword research and selection
- Keyword placement throughout the web page
- Internal site linking structure
- Offsite link popularity
All of these areas are essential in driving
qualified traffic to your site, but what happens when your SEO efforts begin
to pay off and you start to see an increase in visitor traffic? Measuring
the onsite behavior of your visitors and spiders is essential, not only in
gauging the effectiveness of your optimization efforts, but in measuring the
effectiveness of your website design in converting those visitors to buyers.
In this article we will provide you with an
overview of web analytics, explore how to leverage the most basic web
analytics information and explain how it can help in the SEO process. For
SEO and online marketing in general, the most fundamental metrics to focus
on are visits, page views and referrals. Below is a brief description of
each metric and its value in the SEO process:
Basic Web Analytics Metrics
Visits
A visit is a series of actions that begins
when a visitor views their first page from your site, and ends when the
visitor leaves your site or remains idle for a period of time (usually 30
minutes). Looking at visit trends over time for your site is an effective
way to measure the overall impact of your optimization efforts. Although
there are usually seasonal and cyclical factors that affect visitor traffic,
the more history you can collect, the better you will be able to isolate,
identify and measure SEO changes that were responsible for the increase in
traffic volume. It is also important to measure conversions or leads to
ensure the traffic you are attracting consists of visitors genuinely
interested in you content. For example, in your keyword selection, you may
have chosen a term that was too general and that has attracted a different
audience than you intended.
Page Views
In order to view a web page with embedded
images, a browser must retrieve multiple files. The page and its embedded
files counts as a single page view. Understanding how many page views and
which pages are being viewed is important in gauging the effectiveness of
keywords research and selection. Knowing how many visitors viewed a specific
product or category page is a very good indication of the success of
selecting and optimizing for a specific key phrase.
Referrals
A referral is a web page that contains a link
to one of your site pages that was used by a visitor to get to your site.
This report will give you a count of key phrases for each search engine.
Understanding where your referrals are coming from is essential in fine
tuning your keywords. Most of your traffic will come from search engines,
but not all traffic. You will also receive traffic from other non search
engine sites linking to your site. The Search Phrases report is also useful
in what it doesn’t show. Target keywords that do not show on a search phrase
report should raise a flag and prompt investigation to determine the cause.
Measuring Spider Traffic
The basic metrics should also be used to
measure search engine spider traffic. Knowing which pages spiders have
traversed, the depth of the crawl, and how often they visit can provide
valuable insight into the effectiveness of the site’s design and internal
linking structure.
Spider Crawl Depth
The depth of a spiders visit refers to how
much of the site’s content is traversed and indexed by the spider. When
looking at a typical website design hierarchy, you may have product,
category and informational pages. It’s important to understand which content
in a particular area is visited by spiders because most spiders will not
visit all of the pages of a site. The number of pages visited will depend on
many factors, but is usually most dependent on how important the site is
viewed by the particular search engine. The importance of a site is, of
course, determined by offsite links, page content and themes. The most
important content should be placed as close to the top of the site’s
hierarchy as possible to maximize the exposure of the content to the
greatest number of search engine spiders.
Spider Visit Frequency
Understanding how often a spider visits a
site can give insight into how the search engine views your site’s content
and importance. For many search engines, the more important the site is
viewed, the more frequently it will be visited. This can obviously be an
important indication of the success of your SEO efforts.
Spider Path Analysis
Knowing the path a spider takes when
traversing a site can provide a wealth of information that can help in
identifying broken links or other site design problems. Some of the most
important information that can be gleaned from spider path analysis is
knowledge of paths that are not taken. Identifying these paths and
correcting the cause for the lack of traffic can have a dramatic effect on a
site’s visitor traffic, page views and ultimately, ROI. Some examples of
issues that may be brought to light with spider path analysis include:
- Unintended robot exclusions in robots.txt
or meta tags
- URL’s containing a session id that prevent
spider traversal
- Site design problems in the internal
linking structure
- Broken internal links
Conclusion
We invite you to visit Web Stats software
provided by your host. Unlike your offline business it is easier than you
thing to understand visitors behavior and plan your online business growth.
|
Click
here
to share
your
opinion
about
this
article... |
|
