Site Stats LIVE! So, what’s the point?

Hi Folks! I’ve been coming across a number of people asking me where their listing is and where these hits are coming from, but they are still having trouble locating their links on the engines. Before we discuss the need for better optimization for the words and phrases they want to show up on (of course, you can’t just plug in your favorite words in the meta tags anymore), I want to see where their hits are coming from. I would imagine that these people would want to know where the hits are coming from as well.

Now, some of you are saying “I just read my log files and I know who is coming and where they’re from.” Great! You are fortunate enough to have access to those logs. You are also fortunate enough to be able to do something with them. Let’s face it, some seem to have a natural understanding of their computer and the internet while others find computers and the internet a bit more confusing. These people need to use the Internet just like the tech geeks; Many need it even more as it is the lifeblood of their business that a tech geek couldn’t dream of running.

Anyway, that is where SiteStats comes in. People need to know who is visiting their site from where and what they’re checking out. With a very simple JavaScript inserted onto the pages you want to track, you can find out a great deal about your visitors including what keywords they are searching for to find you. AddWeb will insert this script automatically.

Now, let’s look at Joe. He has a great site selling Widgets of all shapes and sizes. He has one widget called the “Double Helix” that has gotten a write up from a widget reviewer. The write up was over a year ago and the double has taken the back seat to the triple helix and the super triple.

Joe’s traffic is dropping and he doesn’t know why. He has no idea where the traffic he has is coming from and he can’t find his site with the words he cares about “Triple Helix” and “Super Triple”. What can he do?

He doesn’t have access to the log files and wouldn’t know what to do with a log analyzer anyway. Joe gets SiteStats and plugs the tracking script into all of his pages. It doesn’t take him long to figure out that the majority of his traffic is coming in to the Double Helix review page (this is in the Page Detail report). This tells him a few things.

1. Reviews might be in order for the Triple and Super Triple.
2. He might want to restructure the site a bit to make the menu easier to get to the new products from the double.
3. He has a good foundation to start optimizing the other widget pages. Don’t make a duplicate, but rewrite the other pages to match the flow of information on the Double Helix pages.

Once Joe knows where people are coming into the site, he’ll want to check out where they are coming from. He’ll want to look at the Keywords report for this. What he finds here is a fair variety of words, some that seem to have no relation, but many associated with the double helix and the review on his site. He’s getting a lot of traffic from Google, some more from AltaVista and MSN, but nothing to speak of from most of the other engines. He’s going to have to get on the ball and start promoting his site with LinkTrader. He will also want to plug in some of the keywords and phrases into Ranking to find out where he’s placed on the engines he’s getting traffic from and find out where he might need some help.

So, how did Joe figure this out? Fairly easily. Joe created a SiteStats account through AddWeb and waited for the e-mail with his account number. This should be pretty close to instantaneous and if it doesn’t get to you within a couple of hours, please let us know. He knows that adding the http:// to the front of his URL will restrict him from tracking secure pages and specifying pages to track (/subdir/page.htm) will prevent him from tracking any and all pages on his site. So Joe only entered ultimatewidgets.com into the domains to track. You see, he also realized that his provider would allow his site to appear without the www. ahead of it.

When Joe got the account number out of his e-mail, he activated his account and started adding the script to his website. He located the folder his pages were in and used the automatic JavaScript insert on the pages he wanted to track. He wasn’t using frames or includes, so he was able to track all pages and not worry about separating them to prevent double tracking.

Once he had finished adding the script to his pages, he uploaded them to his website, just like any other update. Checking the pages, he found a nearly invisible dot at the bottom of each. He hovered his mouse over this and noticed that the link was there. This told him everything was working properly. His 3 month / 30,000 page view trial had started and he was ready to learn all he could about his traffic using the reports from SiteStats.