Monitoring You Web Traffic is important in the success of your site.

Example 1

The figure at the right shows the statistical hits, files, pageviews, sessions, and kilobytes for a real website during development. Notice that the stats start during November and continue in increase dramatically until January. During the early part of this time most of the hits are from the developer as the pages were developed. Search engine optimization was going on during development, so as the page development matured the increase in the hits became primarily from other sites that were beginning to find this site. The green indicates the hits, the blue the files, the purple the pageviews, red the sessions, and the orange the KBs transferred.

A paid ad was done on Yahoo at the end of November. At this time the keyword phrase used in the design was competing with 1290 other sites on Yahoo; yet this site was #1 in Yahoo for that keyword phrase when this graph was made. The KEI from Wordtracker for this keyword phrase was 48, a very good value.

Although #1 in Yahoo, this same site was buried in Google somewhere. It really was not showing up for anything on any top pages there, even with multiple pages in Google linking to it. This is a fairly common problem I have seen (the sandbox effect). Until 6-8 months have passed, you will have a hard time getting a good rank in Google's over 8 billion pages. Yahoo's rank does depend on the number and quality of the incoming links, but page design is a bigger factor in Yahoo's ranking. We have an Adword advertisement going in Google, but that won't help ranking any. The submission to Open Directory Project for this site, but that can take months to position. The Adwords advertisement, however, is driving hits to this site. The ad just doesn't affect ranking.

The monitoring statistics also told us people were coming into the first page but then bouncing. They were not going to the rest of the pages and the conversion rate (people taking action) was low. The solve this, we did major redesign of the home page for a strong call to action. We also did some keyword phrase rework. Since Yahoo will re-index the site every 48 hours with a paid ad, we could see the effect of our changes quickly. The counts soared, and people started looking at more than the first page.

Example 2

Here is another monitor graph of a real web site during development over about the same number of months. The difference here is that the client did not pay for any search engine optimization and had strong ideas how he wanted the site done, which violated some basic SEO rules. The home page of the site contained two large linked graphics (Spash home page) with no text. There was nothing for the search engines to use for indexing and there was no site map to provide any crawl-down. The hits are there during the development, but everything falls off after that. There's a great web site there, but unless he has offline advertising he won't get much in the way of hits. He should add a headline on the home page, some body text below the images, add a site map, and then start with finding a few directories to link into his site.