Using Your Web Stats for SEO: Getting the Most from your Web Stats - Search Engines and Errors
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3. Search Engines
Most website stats programs collect data regarding which search engines crawl your site, when they do, how many pages or links they crawl, and other pertinent information. You can view which pages are indexed in the search engines because this data is collected in your stats.
I will discuss more about this in the section entitled: How to use your web stats for search marketing.
- Keyword Search – Which keywords a visitor types into a search engine can be recorded in your web stats. When people are looking for something in particular and find your site, are these keywords they used relevant? If not, changing your site keywords for more relevant search results will benefit your site far more than unqualified traffic from irrelevant keywords.
- Key Phrases – Watch carefully which key phrases are bringing people to the site. Most people do not search with single words, but rather with phrases. It is essential to carefully track these phrase because there are times you may not see your exact phrase being used in volumes, but yet a very large number of variations of that phrase are bringing them to your site. Keep an eye on how many page views each specific page is receiving rather than only the exact phrase used.
4. Errors
Keep a close eye on error pages reported in your stats. Every single error report is not an issue, as some spiders will frequently go on “fishing expeditions," looking for common pages that do not actually exist on my server. You may have some images causing error pages when folks are searching Google images. Most importantly, you can quickly find problems on your site, as good stats will tell you exactly which page is creating the error. This alone can save you some serious mistakes. If a search engine spider or a visitor follows a link that does not exist, or leads to a 404 Page Not Found error, you will be notified in your web stats; if a page cannot be accessed because of a Forbidden or Internal Server Error, it will also be reported.
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