SEO Consultant Ireland

When you manage to capture your web site visitors, understanding how you did it is extremely important to base your future efforts on how to grow your web site traffic. Here are the basic questions you need to answer for each of your visitors:

Where did he came from?
What search phrase he used?
Where did he land on your web site?

The free questions above are the key of understanding your traffic. I lots of cases you will have to drill down further and answer questions like:

Where geographically is your web site visitor from?
What was your rank in the SERP for the phrase he was searching for?
How was your site represented in the SERP for the search phrase he was searching for?
Where did he go on your site?
Where did he go next?
How long was he on the site?

We all know that Google Analytics is the most used online web site log analyzer today. It is free, and Google is ingesting a lot in improving it constantly. But anyone who used it knows very well that although it is probably the best overall service it still lacks the capability to answer half of the questions listed above.

The result is that if you really want to understand your visitors you will have to use multiple web log analyzers. Especially if you have an active site where the content is dynamic and ever changing you will require a real time display of the activity on your web site to understand what do people actually read, when and why. The same article published in the different times of the day will not attract the same numbers of visitors. That and number of similar situations is where you are 100% helpless with just Google Analytics since it’s data is really far from real time, and is not even intended for such use (it is best used as an overview of the historical data).

There are number of tools that can help you to work with the real time data. You can analyse your raw log files yourself with software packages like WebTrends, or you can use the online services. There is a long list of them and each has a number of nice features so your choice will depend on what exactly are you looking for. The online web site visitors tracking services are usually free to begin with and then paid for when your traffic grows.

The ones I can recommend are StatCounter and the one with interesting features for bloggers is FEEDJIT.

The Content is The King! –

Everyone working in the search engine optimisation industry (SEO) is asking themselves the same question: Is onsite optimisation more important than the offsite optimisation today? Are those inbound links from other sites really crucial in determining the sites ranking? Should one invest his time to do the optimisation of the page itself at all if the ranking is determined by the number and the quality of the inbound links?

Here is a test to answer to the question:

1. Register a new domain name.
2. Install some blogging software on it.
3. Set up your blogging software so that is sends a PING to the search engines when a new post is published.
4. Setup and configure the XML Sitemap generation and automatic submission after a new post is published on a blog.
5. Setup the SEO optimisation of your blog posts page – Title, Meta, URL rewriting, H1, H2,…
6. Write your first article with a Title of your blog post as the phrase you want to rank high in Google. For the purpose of this test take an easy 4 or 5 word phrase.
7. Wait from a few minutes to a few days, make a search for the phrase that is a tile of your blog post.
8. If everything is done right – you should have your blog post listed on the No 1. In Google within a week of registering a domain.

Note: there isn’t a single inbound link to that domain at all, and jet it ranks on top of the search for the specific phrase.

Conclusion:

Inbound links are important for your web site search ranking. But inbound links, regardless of their quantity or their quality (importance of the sites linking to you, and text they link to you with) cannot replace the content on your site. The test above proves the opposite scenario – where there are absolutely none inbound links, and the content on a well optimised web page itself made the page to rank on top in the search engine for the relevant keyword.

The Content is The King!

In the article: Good Google Web Traffic – Bad Google Web Traffic I defined some web traffic as ‘Bad’. The fact is that in most online businesses there is the traffic that the business will profit from and there is that ‘other’ web traffic.

The relevancy plays the crucial role. If the visitors are brought to the web site that does not provide them with what they come to find on the web site, they will leave. If they leave from the same page they have landed on – there is no benefit to the business from such a visitors. The only way such visitors could contribute to the business is to click on the advertisement on your web site. But that’s a whole different story…

The point is that having thousands of visitors on the web site is worthless if those visitors ended up on the web site ‘by mistake’. It is extremely important when purchasing the advertisement on a web site to analyze the traffic, and see where and how is this traffic ending up on a web site that is being evaluated. It is not only important to check if it is ranked high for the relevant terms, but to check the figures from the competition, and try to find out if it is ranked high for unrelated search terms – and gaining a huge traffic from such unrelated search terms. It seems like an impossible task, but a number of search engine ranking tools can help to achieve the task fairly quickly.