Track incoming traffic
Once you increase search engine traffic, wouldn't it be nice to know where it's
coming from? Tracking your incoming traffic may depend on your Internet Service
Provider. Each one has different policies about showing you logs of your web
site activity. They are not always willing to get these to you. If you run
a web site for profit, insist on them. These logs can be invaluable.
Log files from different servers can be quite different. There are some things
that are very important. I have included these features in the example
below.
Visitors Location
The address of each visitor is logged. The address is an exact machine, but not
likely an exact person. Often, it might even just give you an IP address. If it
always gives you an IP address, ask your ISP to set "DNS Lookup" to ON.
The real value of knowing your visitor can vary. The first page they visit tells
you how they arrived. Contrary to popular belief, visitors can find your site
through any page on your site. When you list your web page on the search engine,
they list all of your pages, not just the first.
You can track the route a visitor takes through your site by following the name
through the logs. This can let you know what pages are percieved as valuable.
You may want to make more like them, or tune up the ones that aren't interesting
enough.
If you started an ad campaign in a local newspaper, you can get an idea of
whether the ad is working. Maybe you're passing out cards at various networking
functions or just changed your yellow page ads. These logs are full of clues to
help you tune your marketing machine.
Quite often, you can pick out visitors from other countries. If they all quit at
the same page, you might check to see if something is confusing or maybe even
offensive. Different words can have totally different meanings in other parts of
the world.
Date and Time
Date and time seems pretty self-explanatory. You can still see some trends that
you might not have thought of. If people spend 5 minutes per page, they are most
likely reading it. If they only spend 5 seconds, they are not.
Current Resource
The current resource is the item your visitor is requesting, either directly or
by your page referencing to it. It may show every graphic, cgi, txt or other
files your visitor may be requesting.
The HTML (or htm) files are probably the most useful items for tracking our
traffic. Usually, the first page will be called simply (/), also known as the
root directory. In this web site, the first page would actually be
http://www.makemyownwebpage.com/index.htm. The "index.htm" page name is
generally assumed.
Refering site address
The refering site address is a very useful marketing tool. It answers the
important question, "where do my customers come from?" This tells us what domain
is refering our visitors. In the case of Search Engines, it can even tell us
what keywords they searched for when they found us! This can help enormously to
increase search engine traffic.
We can also purchase web site traffic by the click through. Since we are paying
for each visitor, it would be foolish not to track this traffic.
