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HomeSEO Measuring Web Site Statistics as Part of Your SEO Strategy
Measuring Web Site Statistics as Part of Your SEO Strategy
Measuring the behavior of visitors and spiders should be an integral
part of your optimization efforts. In recent articles we have focused
on the important areas of the SEO process including:
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. One of the most useful
search engine reports in WebTrends, a leading provider of web analytics
solutions, is the Search Phrases report. 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
Putting it All Together
Now that we have a basic understanding of the fundamental metrics in
web analytics and their place in the optimization process, the next
logical step is to think about how we might use this information in
conjunction with keyword ranking metrics provided in WebPosition.
A common request we hear from users of WebPosition is to get a
consolidated view of WebPosition keyword position rankings and search
engine referrals in the same report. Why do they ask us for this type
of report? It allows users to understand the relationship between
keyword ranking and the number of referrals for a key phrase.
If you’re
interested in taking your SEO analysis to the next level, there is a
way to do this today through the use of a WebTrends SmartReports for
Excel®. SmartReports includes the ability to combine WebTrends data
with 3rd party data (e.g. WebPosition Professional CSV formatted export
files) in one report. The process for combining data can actually be
automated through the use of the solutions scheduling capabilities, so
that your SmartReports data is always current and meaningful without
having to do any manual work. As a result, getting visibility into your
turn-key SEO information can be as simple as opening an Excel
spreadsheet.
If you haven't already, download WebPosition Gold 3. It will give you a
clear picture of how you are ranking for the keywords and engines. And
even better, WebPosition Gold 3 combined with WebTrends 7 provides the
critical insight to tie together how your search rankings affect your
conversion results.
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Convio Names Sara Spivey Chief Marketing Officer - PR Inside
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