Measuring Search Traffic
Classic web analytics data is an incredible asset to SEO. Here are three examples of ways to utilize this data for SEO purposes:
Look at your daily referral reports to detect newly received inbound links (the great majority of webmasters click on a link after implementing it, to make sure it works)
Look at the search terms people use to come to your site to spot long tail search opportunities
Measure the results of your campaigns by tracking the increase in conversions you are driving over time
Web analytics are a must-have for any web publisher.
Basic Overview
Your hosting company most likely provides a free web analytics solution, such as AWStats, Webalizer, or something similar. Although these tools provide valuable data, they are very limited in scope, and other tools out there provide significantly more data. Here are six of the best-known ones:
Web analytics platforms track your site’s traffic in two major ways. The older of the two methodologies is to use software that analyzes your web server logfiles after traffic has occurred. Setting up this type of solution generally involves installing the software on an internal server that is able to gain access to the logfiles.
The newer methodology involves implementing JavaScript tags on all of the pages of your website. Provided that you have a basic template for your pages, this generally is a fairly straightforward process. ...
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