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The Art of SEO
book

The Art of SEO

by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, Jessie Stricchiola
October 2009
Beginner content levelBeginner
602 pages
19h 50m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from The Art of SEO

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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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596809133Errata Page