Analyzing Your Website Traffic

The key to improving your site is diligent review of the its statistics. Your hosting vendor typically provides a report capability as part of their service. Checking these on a regular basis offers valuable insights into visitor behavior and clues to how you can make your site more productive. For example:

• On what page do most people enter your site?
• How long do they stay?
• Where do they exit your site?
• Where are they coming from?
• Where do referrals come from?
• What external links are sending the most traffic to your site?
• How often are search engine spiders crawling your site for updates?
• What keyword searches are sending most people to your site?

Reviewing these stats and thinking about them is the quickest way to enhancing your site. For example, if most people enter your site on the home page, but leave with 10 seconds or so, then you know that your homepage needs a little work. Also, one linked site is sending you most of your referral traffic, perhaps a closer business relationship with that site is in order. If Google is not regularly crawling your site, maybe you should re-submit to them. Think about it...