All You Need to Know About Your Website Traffic is Contained in 5 Key Stats

PR Log (Press Release) – Jan 07, 2008 – Most Web Hosts will provide you with a Cpanel, where you can create E-mail Accounts, Upload Web Pages and check your stats. Most of the Cpanel's are very similar if not identical to the one my Hosts uses.

When it is time to check my web page traffic statistics I click on Log and then Web/FTP Stats and finally AWStats. I am now presented with a List of all kinds of Stats to look at. Daily History, Monthly History, Country, Browser, Day of Week, Hour or Day. Trying to understand them all will make you dizzy. Since my traffic comes from 3 primary places Search Engines, One Way back links and Reciprocal links I concentrate on the following 5 Stats

  1. Referers Origin
  2. Referring search engines
  3. Referring sites
  4. Search Keyphrases
  5. Search Keywords

1 - Referers Origin

This Stat will give you a breakdown of what percent of your traffic came from the following categories

  1. Direct address / Bookmarks
  2. Links from a NewsGroup
  3. Links from an Internet Search Engine
  4. Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines)
  5. Unknown Origin

This stat is a snap shop of your overall traffic. Some questions to ask yourself

  1. Is your traffic well balanced between all the areas?
  2. Does your traffic favor Search engines over Newsgroups and External pages.
  3. If you concentrate your effort in one of these areas more then others did you get the expected result?
  4. Where am I weakest?
  5. Where am I strongest?

2 - Referring search engines

This Stat will list all the major search engines and tell you what percent of your search engine traffic came from each Search engine. It is best to concentrate on the Big 3 (Yahoo, MSN and Google). Google is the Most Popular Search engine with Yahoo a close 2nd and MSn 3rd.

  1. Google Processes about 37% of all Internet Search requests
  2. Yahoo Process about 35% of all Internet Search requests
  3. MSN Process about 16% of all Internet Search requests
  4. The remaining Internet Search requests are split between the rest of the search engines

Is the Search engine Traffic to your web page divided the same way? Does any search engine over perfrom or under perform it's internet average?

3 - Referring sites

This will tell you which web pages are your best link partners. If you do article submissions or other forms of linking this will tell you how well this worked. I was shocked to see that 10% of all my non Search engine traffic came from 1 web page where I gave a testimonial.

4 - Search Keyphrases

Here you can see your Top 10 Keyword Phrases as well as a full list of your keyword phrases. Look over the top 10? Are those the one's you expected? Are you surprised by the results? Where can you do better?

Next look over the full list? Do you have under achievers or over archives?

5 - Search Keywords

Unless you happen to be optimizing for a keyword like Babies, Pillows or Graduates you wouldn't need to worry about this Stat. Most of the Keywords reported don't give much useful information. If you are optimizing for a Keyword like babies then find babies in the list and see how well you are doing.

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