Although you may experience many visits to your website, it takes hard work to turn those visits into actual sales. Learning and promoting good SEO methods and following good marketing principals will insure that your visits are converted into actual sales. Further, understanding the difference between visitors and “qualified” visitors is necessary if you are to succeed in building real revenue.
The first step is to add a statistics program to your website, and to use the information gleaned from these statistics to improve the site. We’ll start with the main heading. You’ll see a menu item called “hits” which represents the total number of requests made to the server in any given period of time. These search requests (hits) are then transferred to a website offering the information based upon the search request.
Most statistics programs list these hits weekly or monthly. The word “files” means the total of number of hits (requests by those searching) that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user. If the pages are already listed in the browser’s cache, they will not be listed as “hits.”
Determine the difference between hits and files and you can get a good indication of how many repeat visitors you have coming to the site.
How important are search strings and referrers when reading stats?
Actual words used to search for your product or service will offer you a look inside the mind of the consumer. The menu option in your statistics program called “search” shows you these exact word patterns, normally referred to as “search strings.” By reviewing the words used by those searching for your unique market, will give you information on what topics you should be blogging about.
Each new blog post can then be dedicated to the different individual search terms. This will assist with driving more of the qualified buyers to your front door (your website).
Referrers are those URLs that lead from the searchers site to your site.
As you examine the referer string, you can identify other sites and how the search was originated. You may learn that you could benefit by adding more reciprocal link backs to your site or you may find out just how successful your linking to another site might be.
If you have embarked on an advertising solution and are paying for an Ad Word campaign or other, you will be able to learn (through your statistics program) just how successful your effort has been. If the success is smaller than you had expected, it might be a good idea not to sign up again with that particular advertiser in the next cycle.
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Article by: Jean Holland-Rose
Chief Creative Officer and SEO Professional
