Search Engine Optimization .. WebSite Statistics and Logs

If you know what you are talking about and can express it in numbers then you know something about it .. If you cannot express it in numbers then your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind. These are the words of Lord Kelvin the famous scientist best remembered for his developing the degrees Kelvin (centigrade) temperature measurement system.

Every time there is a request from your server on which the web site is hosted there is a log file generated. These files generate considerable information in an ASCII type format making them difficult to understand and interpret when large numbers of logs are generated.

Software in many formats is available for interpreting these logs and providing useful data or statistics.

One of the important items you need to check with your host is what stats package is offered and whether it can be easily accessed from the control panel or a distinct web address. The popular ones supplied by my hosts are Webalizer, Analog and the one I like Awstats. One of my hosts actually installed Awstats at my request for $20.

Take a look at the screen shots a bit later to see the kind of information produced and displayed by the different stats packages.

Let me clear up one very common misconception about logs and site visits and all those massive number thrown around to impress and confuse us all.

A hit, as normally recorded by a stats package, is:

• NOT the number of visitors to your site

• NOT the number of pages viewed

It is in simple terms a record of how many files have been requested from the server. A file can be a picture, a script, or a HTML page. For example if your home page has 6 images mixed with text on the page then when the page has been opened by the site visitor your log will record 7 hits (not 1) one for the page and six for the images.

It somehow does not sound quite so good to talk of 10,000 page visits when you could impress your colleague with the fact that you got 70,000 hits last month.

Page visits are far better indications of the sites popularity but even this can be misleading and can be influenced easily if the aim is solely to impress. There is software that can automatically log on and off to any selected web page imagine what this can do for your hits and page views. You can even make your own page your system home page so every time you switch on your own page comes up.

A better and more useful statistic is to identify the number of unique visitors and when you do this the numbers come down to understandable and realistic levels. In the end it is visitors that buy from you not hits or page views. Good stats packages do this and also identify exactly where the visitor came (referrer sites) from and how long the visitor stayed on each page. This is called stickiness. The best stats packages even identify the actual name of the referrer site and not just its ip number.

AWSTATS, which is the package I like will split up the visits by different search engines and also tell you which query phrases were used to find the site. This is some of the most important information you can get from a log. The same package will identify % views by search engines, % views from pages on own site, % views from outside sites and balance due to others such as bookmarks or direct entry.

Page views combined with unique visitors and time spent on the pages viewed becomes very meaningful information, which can be analysed to determine new opportunities or directions to be taken.

Your logs enable you to calculate click-throughs and conversion rates as we discussed in a previous chapter. This is vitally important information.