Entries Tagged 'Website' ↓

Analyzing Web Traffic

Author: Larry Strawson

Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.

Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data – the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

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Originally posted 2005-05-12 13:21:28. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Author: Elizabeth McGee

I often wonder how serious people are when it comes to their websites. I thought that most everyone knew that the phrase “Build it and they will come” no longer applies on the internet but I’m not sure how many people really believe it.

I look at sites everyday as part of my sales strategy and I can’t tell you how many of them violate the obvious elements of good website design and submission.

What even amazes me more is that they can’t figure out why they don’t get sales or visitors.

Do yourself a favor and attempt to apply the following tactics to your site. They won’t cost you a thing except a little time and effort to apply them.

** About Page **

Always include an about page on your site. Don’t be afraid to tell your story and let people know who you are and how you arrived where you are.

Opening yourself up and letting people know who you are adds an element of trust. It exposes your personality, capabilities and knowledge. All factors that let your readers know you are genuine.

** Include all your contact information **

Let your visitors know that you are available. Encourage questions, email and phone calls. Include your name, address and phone number. If you can, it’s also helpful to place a photo on your site. Familiarity is key and it can add one more link in the ladder of trust.

** Headlines **

Create compelling headlines. Peak the interest of your readers. This is your chance to grab their attention and incite them to read on.

Don’t be flashy or obnoxious. Simply tell it like it is. Capture their attention with descriptive, informative words. Get your readers involved in your information. Ask questions. Make them think.

You might be surprised to learn that just one compelling headline can bring instant sales almost overnight.

**Create your meta tags **

This is the first place I look when people tell me they aren’t getting visitors. I often see sites that have no title or description tag or the tags don’t follow the suggested guidelines for proper setup.

Here’s an example of how the tags might look for a site that sells hummingbird feeders:

<title>Hummingbird Feeders: Shop For Hummingbird Feeders Online</title> <meta name=”description” CONTENT=”Hummingbird feeders. Shop For hummingbird feeders online”> <meta name=”keywords” CONTENT=”hummingbird feeders, hummingbird feeder, bird feeder, bird feeders”>

You will need to do this for each page of your site. Each page needs to have it’s own set of tags. I also recommend focusing on one keyword per page, two at the very most. Too many keywords can confuse what your page is about.

Always make sure that your keywords are scattered throughout your text as well, however don’t sacrifice good content for nonsense. Your text should be easy to read and should not sound redundant. Make your pages at least 250 words.

** Testimonials **

Solicit feedback from buyers you’ve had. Ask them to write a small testimonial that you can place on your site. This goes a long way to help convince your visitor that your products and services are sound.

** Linking **

Reciprocal linking is a common and effective tactic for obtaining search engine status and page rank but it’s also the most time consuming. It requires making contacts, following up with contacts and updating your website.

While reciprocal linking is an excellent way of establishing page rank it’s not the only way. Page rank can also be established by submitting your site to directories, writing articles and setting up blogs. Don’t underestimate the power of website links. Take the extra few hours a day and get your site noticed.

** Offer Guarantees **

Always offer your products with a guarantee. This is often the extra boost a buyer needs to make the purchase.

A good site will offer 100%, no-questions-asked, money-back guarantees. People rarely take advantage of such guarantees but it’s this statement that may tip the scales in your favor.

** Submit Your Site **

Last, but not least, don’t neglect to submit your site to the search engines. Many of them are no longer free but the fees are nominal and worth the expense. Google still offers a free submit and it’s easy, simply type in your URL address, however make sure your meta tags include a title and description tag first.

For the free search engines I don’t recommend using automated submissions. Submit them yourself taking care to compose accurate titles descriptions and keywords.

About the author: Elizabeth McGee has spent 20 years in the service and support industry. She has moved her expertise to the world wide web helping businesses find trusted tools, enhance customer service, build confidence and increase sales. You can visit Elizabeth’s sites at: http://www.pro-marketing-online.com http://www.homenotion.com

Originally posted 2005-03-30 13:32:50. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Web Site Hosting – An Easy Guide

Author: Calin Indre

Web Hosting – Made Simple

What is web hosting anyway? What do I get when I buy a web hosting solution?

To make thing clear from start let’s just say how it all works. Web pages basically consist of text and images. Generically, the information contained by these files is called content. The look of the web page is called design. In order to be accessible to online users, all these files must be stored on a web server. You can think of web servers as computers storing the files of tens or hundreds of web sites. These computers are all connected to the Internet through high-speed connection. When you access a web page, your browser connects to the web server that stores that page and downloads it to your computer.

So a web server is a must when you plan to share your web site content with online users via the Internet. There are thousands of web servers in the world, and there are companies that own them. Such a company is called web-hosting provider. A web-hosting provider can have dozens of web servers hosting thousands of web sites. The web server computers are found usually in large numbers and are all housed in special buildings or sections of buildings called data center. Apart from the high-speed Internet connection, these locations are set up to ensure the optimum operational conditions and security for the web servers. HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, & Air Conditioning) control, fire protection, virus protection, data backup facility, power backup, even autonomy in case of disaster. Another term for the web servers in the data center is a web farm.

To be able to run your site properly you need a space on the web server to store your data and an Internet connection to it. The amount of data available to you on a web server is simply referred as space and is usually quantified in MB. The Internet connection needed so that your web site can be accessed online is referred as bandwidth and is also measured in MB or even GB. Having the glimpse of the basics, it must be said that different web-hosting providers offer different space and bandwidth. Space and bandwidth are usually the main characteristics of a web-hosting plan.

The terminology associated with web hosting can be quite dazzling: virtual web hosting, dedicated hosting; co-locating hosting, shared hosting reseller hosting.

Shared Web Hosting

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Originally posted 2005-04-12 11:54:48. Republished by Old Post Promoter

This $75 program is one the reasons I no longer use any stats program that can be seen by search engines on my websites.

[Program name omitted] is a … mass referrer spammer, which means that it will make a connection to a buttload of sites of your choosing with any referrer URL and User-Agent that you specify. This accomplishes several things. Firstly, it generates webmaster traffic from webmasters checking their referral statistics.

Yep, you might get a visit from me. If your traffic is really low another visitor might inspire a moment’s false optimism. That certainly won’t make me turn to you for mortgage information, buy the secret of untold wealth from you, use your dating service or get you an extra click on a banner ad. Seeing you aren’t a friend I’ll just close that Firefox tab and move on.

Secondly, it boosts your link popularity and thereby your Google PR, because a lot of sites have public referral stats with linked entries. [Program name omitted] operates on textfiles with URL-lists, and a textfile of 3047 active blog websites which you can use to start getting free traffic and PR right away is included!

I’m sure at least one of my sites is on that list. I used to run Refer there and like many webmasters made the stats available to anyone who wanted to look. That was how I learned about referrer spamming. It took less than a month to get all trace of those bogus referrals out of Google.

Even now “thehostingnet.com” sends a bunch of referral spam to that site. They aren’t getting an iota of Google PR from doing that. But it no more harms me than it does them a lick of good.

If you run a web statistics package ideally you keep it out of your server’s web accessible areas. If you can’t block the subdirectory in your robots.txt. You might want to password protect it as well.

Once you are listed as a site to be sent referrer spam I don’t think you’ll ever fall out of the lists. But you can keep the spamming from having any effect.

Originally posted 2004-09-03 11:53:21. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Author: Glenn Haertlein

:::It’s All About the Numbers::: If you want to know how many people are coming to your website; if you want to know how “sticky” your website is; if you want to know what pages of your website are attracting the most attention, you have to know the numbers. And to get the numbers you need, you need a hit counter that does more than just give you a head count.

Having a hit counter (or stat counter) on the front page of your website is nice, but most web savvy individuals know that those numbers can be artificially inflated. While a big number can be impressive, you as a webmaster need something more than a head count. You need to know what those numbers mean, and what changes need to be made, if any, to improve your site’s popularity.

:::So, what does a good stat counter do?::: A good stat counter counts. No kidding, right? True, but the key to a good stat counter lies in what your stat counter counts. A good stat counter should track the following kinds of statistics:

* First time visits * Return visits * Page loads * Visitor path * Popular pages * Entry/exit pages * Visit length

A first time visit is exactly that. It’s a visit from someone who has never been to your site before. Most stat counters will create a cookie for people who come to your site. If a visitor comes who has no cookie, they are counted as a first time visitor. Now that’s not foolproof. If the person deletes all of his or her cookies and then returns to your site later, he or she will again be counted as a first time visitor, but then again no system is 100 percent perfect.

A return visit is someone who has returned to your site within an allotted amount of time. Again, a cookie is used to measure this, and most good stat counters will let you set the amount of time between visits. For example, you might not want to count someone as a return visitor who has only been away for ten minutes, but you may want to count them as a return if they have come back after thirty minutes or more.

A page load is every time a page from your website is loaded on a user’s screen. This is where numbers can really become artificially inflated. Let’s say you use a meta tag to refresh your page every two minutes. Every time the page refreshes, it will count as a page load. So if John Q. Public is visiting that page and he’s there for six minutes, his visit will count as three hits instead of one. What’s the harm in that, you wonder, it makes for great numbers. While you do wnat to keep track of page loads to determine things like page popularity, equating page loads with actual visits will give you a reading not based entirely in reality. You need to know if 1,000 page loads is really 1,000 actual visitors, or just twenty people who are really click happy.

The visitor path is a good way to find out where your visitors are coming from and what advertising campaigns and hit-for-clicks programs are paying off. A good stat counter will show you what path a visitor followed to get to your site. Did they come from a a Google or Yahoo search, did they come from one of your hits-for-clicks programs, did they come in through a web ring you joined, or did they just happen to blow in? Knowing the visitor path can give you a good indication about whether your search engine optimization is effective, or if a particular ad campaign or banner is paying off.

Popular pages are exactly what the name suggests. This statistic will tell you what pages on your site are attratcing the most attention — and which ones are not. Having this information will help you to fine tune your site, and can help you determine what your visitors are looking for when they come to visit. It could very well be that what you are trying to give your visitors and what they actually want, are two different things. It may be that you need to change your site’s approach in order to attract and hold visitors. Remember, marketing isn’t about what you like; it’s about what your customers like.

Entry/Exit pages. Like popular pages they can be a pretty good indicator as to what yur visitors are looking for when they come to your website. If they’re leaving from the same pages they are entering, it could be that your site isn’t “sticky” enough. In other words, your site isn’t doing enough to hold your visitors’ interest and getting them to stay and look around. It’s like having a store that everyone drives by, but never enters.

Visit length. This is a record of how long a visitor has stayed at your site. Let’s say you’ve signed up for several hits-for-clicks programs. Your visits are numbering in the hundreds, but people are only staying for about a second (or less). That’s a problem. Again it’s an indication that your site isn’t “sticky” enough. The pages and offers you present in a hits-for-clicks program are entirely different from what you might use in a search engine or e-zine. Once more, you need to reconsider your tactics/strategies if visitors are coming but not staying.

One final thing in this section: You should get a stat counter that allows you to the option of hiding your stats from the general public. Why? Because when you’re first starting out, your visitor count isn’t going to be very high and most people aren’t going to be impressed that they are visitor number 52. They’ll see that and assume that what you have to offer isn’t that great and leave. A stat counter that let’s you hide your numbers from the public until you’re ready to unveil them is a definite plus. Wait untill you can boast several hundred visitors and then allow your stat counter to make that public.

:::Where Should Hit Counters be Placed on Your Website?::: You should put your hit counter code on every page you plan to have visitors see. If you only have the code on your welcome page, how will you know if any other page is being viewed? It may take some time to put the code on every page your visitors might potentially view, but it is well worth the effort.

:::What I Recommend::: A hit counter that I have used for a long time and that offers all of these features for free is StatCounter, available at http://www.statcounter.com. And no, I am not being paid to say that. It’s just my own humble opinion. Whatever hit counter you decide to use for your site (and I strongly recommend you use something), make sure it gives you the statistics you need to give you the most accurate information about your site.

About the author: Glenn Haertlein is webmaster of Everyman’s Computer Page located at http://www.juvio210.com

Originally posted 2005-03-26 22:57:14. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Author: David Bell

Understanding your Website’s traffic logs is a crucial component of your online marketing mix. It tells you what your visitors do, of their own volition, so it’s “market research that cannot lie!” If you understand what you’re seeing, you can make some great strategic and marketing decisions, not only for your Website, but for your business as a whole. Here are seven key marketing elements to study in your traffic analysis:

1. General Statistics

Remember that a “hit” is recorded every time the visitor gets an image or some text from your site — what you need to know is unique user sessions, and how much time people spend on the site — how “sticky” and engaging it is. If you have tons of traffic, but the average time spent on your site is less than a minute — you’ve got a problem!

2. Most and Least Requested Pages

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Originally posted 2005-04-09 23:13:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

I’m not fool enough to pretend that I have any inkling why Google does things or if there was a correlation between my actions and what followed.

I saw picsearch.com’s psbot gobbling up huge amounts of bandwith on some of my sites. Sites that host no images. No pictures, not a one. Unless you followed a few affiliate links. Picsearch was grabbing them as if they were hosted on my own site. Stupid ‘bot.

So I blocked psbot in my robots.txt.

Insane bandwidth consumption dropped massively.

Oddly a week later Google’s indexing of those sites jumped back up to prior levels.

I also did a couple of other things:

Asked become.com to stop indexing a site. They were yanking more bandwidth than even greedy Jeeves. But giving me no referrals. Really when I last looked at Become.com it looked like little more than the world’s largest Amazon affiliate.

And I used the crawl-delay to slow down Yahoo’s slurp and Jeeves.

Some of the sites get a larges volumes of traffic from Yahoo but it was as if the search engine needed to keep knocking at my door like a maniac from a slasher movie.

Instead of having to think of moving the sites to a more expensive server now I can let them just stay where they are.

Ban bad search ‘bots. Do it today.

Originally posted 2005-09-20 18:57:37. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Much to my surprise I find the lines that blocked image hotlinking vanished from my .htaccess file. Possibly from using Cpanel to modify it instead of my text editor. I did catch Cpanel zapping the lines I use to keep out bad user agents.

I’ve spent the last couple of hours trying the various examples of using modrewrite to block hotlinking. Every example that worked also blocked images from showing up on my own site. Tried the SetEnv method also without luck.

I can’t remember where I got what I’d been using. All I remember is that it referenced each directory that I wanted protected.

Originally posted 2004-03-30 16:18:28. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Alan Murray

What is the Robot Text File?

The robot text file is used to disallow specific or all search engine spider’s access to folders or pages that you don’t want indexed.

Why would you want to do this?

You may have created a personnel page for company employees that you don’t want listed. Some webmasters use it to exclude their guest book pages so to avoid people spamming. There are many different reasons to use the robots text file.

How do I use it?

You need to upload it to the root of your web site or it will not work – if you don’t have access to the root then you will need to use a Meta tag to disallow access. You need to include both the user agent and a file or folder to disallow.

What does it look like?

It’s really nothing more than a “Notepad” type .txt file named “robots.txt”

The basic syntax is
User-agent: spiders name here

Disallow:/ filename here

If you use

User-agent: *

The * acts as a wildcard and disallows all spiders. You may want to use this to stop search engines listing unfinished pages.

To disallow an entire directory use

Disallow:/mydirectory/

To disallow an individual file use

Disallow:/file.htm

You have to use a separate line for each disallow. You cannot you for example use

Disallow:/file1.htm,file2.html

You should use

Use-agent/*
Disallow:/file1.htm
Disallow:/file2.htm

For a list of spider names visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/active/html/

Make sure you use the right syntax if you don’t it will not work. You can check you syntax here http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi

For help on creating robot text files there is a program call robogen.

There is a free version and an advanced version, which costs $12.99 http://www.rietta.com/robogen/

Originally posted 2008-08-19 03:18:56. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Author: Englesos on the Web

Web statistics are one of the surest ways of tracking down a poor webmaster – because under no circumstances will that webmaster let you see them. He or she will offer you “digests” (Heavily edited needless to say), will regret that your server does not have statistics installed (highly improbable), or will just say “I’m sorry?” and change the subject.

The excuses for sitting on this crucial source of data are many and various because Webstats alias web server statistics are the only cast-iron method of showing how well – or how badly – your website is actually doing. Used in a positive fashion with a cooperative webmaster, web stats are the ideal fine-tuning tool for improving your websites performance and discovering who your customers are, what they are doing on your site and how you can help them to do it better.

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Originally posted 2005-08-21 16:50:54. Republished by Old Post Promoter