A vital technique, which is somewhat underestimated yet easy to implement, is the use of site statistics. Measuring the behaviour of your visitors and search engine spiders should be a critical part of your SEO effort.
There are many other influences in a successful organic search campaign, offsite and onsite, but what happens after you have attracted visitors to your site? Can you use the knowledge of these visitor trends to maximise traffic further?
Measuring and tracking the onsite behaviour of visitors and spiders is essential SEO. Doing so will allow you to estimate how well your on-page optimisation has been.
There are various site statistic programs available today, and you may already have one implemented by your web hosting company. A select few are:
Page Views
A page view is when a visitor lands on a page. To view this page, the browser must download all the elements on the page - for example, images and stylesheets. Checking and understanding how many visits a page has had is important because it can show how well a page has been optimised and the importance of this page to visitors. For example, if you realise that there have been a large number of page views for a specific product on a shopping website, this indicates a popular product and should be highly visible to users and well optimised to attract organic searchers.
Referrals
Referrals are the source from which the user originates to gain access to your website. By checking your search engine referrals, you will be able to see which search engines are producing what results for your target keywords. This is a good way to check what keywords are important to target: for example, if you notice that you are receiving many referrals from a keyword, you can try to further optimise that page, to maximise exposure and traffic.
Visits
Visits are a series of actions that start when a visitor views their first page on your site, to the last page when a visitor leaves your site. Measuring visit trends over time can give a comprehensive overview of how well your site has been optimised. Monitoring user visits is especially effective for sites that are selling a product because you will be able to tell if the keywords you are targeting are converting visits into sales. A way to monitor trends in your visits is to consider navigation elements on your site. If you have a search feature for example, you might notice that a product - which might be hard to find in a deep level location - is searched for on a regular basis and should have improved navigational options added for better site integration and user experience.
Stats are a useful tool in the webmaster's arsenal and should never be overlooked!
