Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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Traffic to key pages

Traffic to your landing pages, or other key locations on your web-

site, can be a lot more meaningful than overall traffic to your website. Any web log

analyzer worth its salt will be able to show you how many visitors are browsing the

landing pages that you worked so hard to optimize.

Referrers

After all your link-building efforts, wouldn’t you love to know which sites

are actually sending you traffic? After optimizing for the search engines, wouldn’t you

love to know which search terms your visitors used to find you? This is where your

stats start to become truly useful to your SEO campaign. Your web log analyzer can

tell you where your site visitors came from, and even more important, for those that

came to your website from search engines, it can tell you the exact keywords they

searched for. This can be a good source of ideas for finding new keywords to target. It

may also help you identify inbound links you didn’t know existed!

Keep in mind, referrer data is limited to folks that clicked to your site from another site

on the Web. Users that typed your URL directly into their browsers, or clicked from a

bookmark, or clicked from an e-mail, are harder to track.

Exit pages

If it’s good to know how visitors found your site, it’s even more telling to

know where visitors exited your site. Exit pages can be used to diagnose a whole host

of problems, from poor navigation design to poorly targeted traffic. Don’t be surprised

if your home page is high on the list. It’s common for people to arrive at your site and

immediately realize it’s not what they’re looking for. Also, don’t always assume that

exit pages are the “bad guy.” Some websites are set up so that when users click to

make a purchase they are taken to a different site. If this describes your site, then exit-

ing your site may be the best thing a user can do!

However, for most websites, exits represent your conversions walking out the door. If a

large proportion of your visitors are leaving after viewing just one page, either you’re

inviting the wrong crowd to your party or there’s something very unappetizing greeting

them at the door.

EXIT

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