Take look at your visitor logs

We think it is helpful to check a site’s visitor logs periodically. There is a great deal of information in them. It doesn’t matter if they are the logs supplied by your hosting provider or logs you collect using a script embedded on your pages or if you use an external service. The important thing is you should look at this information or engage an SEO specialist to help interpret this information.

So what sort of information is available? How’s this for information:

• Which Search Engine robots are visiting your site. How often they visit. Which pages they have seen. [Ideally we’d like to see the robots back regularly – daily, weekly, monthly depending on the frequency of your updates – and they need to see ALL of your pages. If they don’t look at all of the pages then maybe you have some sort of impediment in your navigation.]
• What keywords were used in various Search Engines to find your site. [If you site is well optimised, you may be surprised by the range of keywords used. It’s not always the most obvious or the ones you are specifically targeting.]
• The locations of your visitors. [This is done by interpreting the IP address of the visitor. If you are marketing to an Australian audience, a high volume of traffic from outside Australia is not relevant and can give you a false indication of success.]
• Time of day, day of week, week of year and / or seasons when you visitors arrive. [Useful to look for any correlation between changes to the website or external programs you undertake intended to attract visitors and the success of those efforts.]
• Your most popular pages. [Useful to find themes relevant to your visitors and that can be used to create additional content.]
• The sites that provide a link to you that are actually generating traffic. [This comes from the referrer information and while it is not always supplied it can be very enlightening. If you are paying for a link or a listing in a directory you want to see that it is producing results.]

All of this information is very relevant to the optimisation effort for your website.

NB: Some of this information is not available in all forms of logs and generally needs some software to interpret the logs. In many cases, this is available as part of your hosting plan. Talk to your host to see what options they offer.

This is really only giving you an overview of the value of your logs. If you don’t understand any of the terms or ideas here, perhaps you would like to contact us so that we can discuss what might be relevant to your website and circumstances.

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