Using Your Web Stats for SEO: Getting the Most from your Web Stats - Visitor Information
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5. Visitor information
- Navigation Paths — Navigation paths are top paths through the website.
They can help you identify where your visitors are going, or tend to go, and then you can streamline your site accordingly. If your visitors get hung up on a page that has no place else to go, then navigation path statistics can help you determine where those visitors are getting stuck. You can then alter your navigation of those pages to make it easy for your visitors to get back to where they want to be.
A navigation path is a sequence of pages that the visitor viewed from the moment he or she enters the site to the moment he or she leaves. From a marketing view, it is important to see the path the visitor takes, and which series of events followed are the most effective. Frequent exit patterns will show your where your site is underperforming.
- Top Requests — Theses are the pages, images, or scripts that are requested the most.
Knowing which pages are the most requested can tell you which ones are very interesting to your visitors, and keep attracting them. You can then modify other pages of your site to incorporate the same elements into those pages to make them more interesting to the viewer. If you are aware which images are requested the most, then you probably can determine how successful the use of those images may be. This also goes for scripts. If you have a newsletter signup script called newsletter.php, and you see that this is one of the top requests, then you can tell that people are interested in signing up for your newsletter.
- Entry Pages — Entry pages are page from which your visitors enter your site.
From this, you can determine which pages are being shown in the search engines, which ones are coming from outside links, and so on. This will also tell you which pages are attracting visitors to your site for the first time, and possibly how you can improve or modify these pages to attract even more people. A good measure of marketing messages at driving visitors to the site can be determined by your website’s entry pages.
- Exit Pages — Exit pages determine where a customer leaves your site.
This is a handy statistic, because it gives you a good viewpoint what might be turning off a visitor to your site, or where a customer decides not to buy. For example, if you are seeing a high amount of traffic leaving your site on your shopping cart checkout page, then you can likely assume that your shopping page is not making your customers happy. Perhaps the script is malfunctioning, or maybe the checkout process is too complicated. Whatever the reason may be for your visitors leaving, knowing which pages they are leaving on will give you a good foundation for improving those pages.
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