Site Traffic Reports and Site Marketing

Summary: Site traffic reports are a key element of search engine tracking and site optimization. Tips on using them in SEO & site marketing, and understanding how you can work around not having them.

Why You Need Them

Site traffic reports are a key element of search engine tracking and site optimization. Without the traffic reports, you can't tell:

• if search engine spiders are visiting your site at all
• if there are any errors that prevent search engine spiders from successfully reviewing your entire site
• how often search engine spiders return to your site to update their information (if they don't return by themselves, you need to resubmit)
• what sites have links to your site that are generating good traffic
• what links are only generating occasional traffic (and thus may need a re-written description)
• what relevant terms typed at the search engines have people clicking through to your site
• what terms that don't relate to your site are bringing people through to your site (i.e. "false click throughs")

Site traffic reports are used throughout the duration of a site optimization project. You start a project by first reviewing the site traffic report to get a baseline of total visits, visits from search engines, terms used, and link activity. Plus, the initial review of a site traffic report can help pinpoint and problems in your code or server setup that are preventing search engines from spidering your site.

Then, after resubmission, you review ongoing site traffic reports to monitor spider visits and revisits, and once you see that the spiders have visited, you review the reports to check the changes in click-through patterns and to make sure no new "false click through" patterns have been created by accident.

Can your site be optimized without access to site traffic reports? Yes, there are things that can be done, but it's a bit more difficult for the following reasons:
 

• In regards to keyword phrases, the site traffic report tells you which ones are currently effective and being clicked on in the search engines -- so without the report you don't have any idea which of your current keywords are or aren't working. This means that you have no idea if you need to change your keywords, so any keyword research is basically done as a shot in the dark.
• In regards to links, without the traffic reports you don't have any indication of which current links are working for you, which means you don't know what types of sites you should request additional links from. This makes any link requests totally untargeted and may mean that hours are wasted requesting links from sites that don't tend to drive any traffic your way.
• The timing of your optimization project is effected by not having access to site traffic reports. Since you don't have a record of when search engine spiders have visited, you have to assume they haven't and wait blindly to see if you're appearing in the search engines. Since many search engines update only once a month, and since you won't know if your site get's reviewed during the open window, you just have wait, try your terms in the search engine, and wait some more. This means that running any final reports showing your search engine position can't be scheduled in advance.
• Most importantly, without site traffic reports you won't know if your optimization project was successful, because you won't have any idea if your site is getting more traffic or not! The bottom line in search engine optimization is to get targeted traffic to the site -- and without a site traffic report you have no idea if your optimization lead to an increase or a decrease in visitors.

Doing Without

So, what can be done without a site traffic report?

1. Competitors' sites can be reviewed and their Meta tags looked at for ideas.
2. Titles and Meta tags can be written based on words used in the companies marketing material and on research into popular keywords.
3. The home page URL can be submitted to directories like Yahoo (there's a fee involved for listing) and Open Directory.
4. A selection of pages can be submitted to "pay for reindexing" subscriptions at Inktomi and AltaVista (prices vary depending on the number of pages submitted).
5. Using variations of the keywords selected for Meta tags, searches can be run to find places that might link to your site - once you find one, you'll need to look it over carefully to see if it already links to you and to see if it looks like it would send relevant traffic.
6. Site pages can be submitted at the free search engines.
7. Search engine ranking reports can be run to see where your site stands for each keyword phrase.
8. You can pay for outsourced tracking -- this usually means adding a small "bug" or hidden image on every page of your site. These bugs are stored on the tracking companies server, and reports are run on their server logs to see how many times your specific bugs are called and who's calling them. The major downside to this is that internet traffic congestion could slow down loading of your site (since each page has to call an object on another server). Also, some of these services are very expensive, and those that aren't expensive often have very limited reporting.

So, there's still plenty that can be done even if your hosting company doesn't provide site logs or traffic reports -- but it makes YOUR job more difficult, because instead of having concrete evidence of who's coming and where from, you just have to hope that the descriptions in the search engines are enticing click throughs and that no-one is clicking through on terms that don't apply.

NOTE
This article can be reproduced elsewhere. All we ask is that you also provide a link back to our web site (www.crendo.com). Comments on this article can be sent to info@crendo.com.

Back to list of articles.