seoance

1. Unique Visitors – We all want to know if people are finding our website and if so, how many. This number can be tricky to determine. In the old days, people installed ‘hit counters” which gave the owner some obscure number regarding the number of times a person opened their website. The problem with hit counters is that they do not accurately count the true number of people who visit the site. Why is this? Hit counters are typically not sophisticated enough to separate a visitor from the data that comes up on your site – therefore, counters will show more hits than there truly are. This sounds complicated but this is how it works. For instance, if you gave a gallery page on your site and it shows twenty thumbnail pictures, each picture that loads is counted as a hit. Text on the page, other images, external stylesheets, external javascripts, links and other elements that require the server to pull a file to build the page register will count as a hit. One visitor may end up appearing as up to 100 hits.

I have seen many people base their unique visitor count primarily on the free hits counter that their hosting company provided or free software they downloaded, which leads them to believe they were receiving great traffic. After looking at their Google Analytics unique visitor count, the number was quite different and extremely low in most situations, which was highly disappointing to the new website owner.

A web analyst not only looks at the true number of visitors that visit your website but they also look at how many of those are Return Visitors in contrast to how many are Unique Visitors. Both are important numbers. Return Visitors can indicate a strong interest in your site and a likeliness of an action being made by that visitor such as a purchase. Unique visitors are valuable as well as it shows how many new people you are attracting.

2. Page Views – This term describes how many different pages a visitor looked at while on your website. The question an analyst is asking is, did this person just look at your front page and leave or did they browse around, click on your links, or read about your product or service. For marketing purposes, it is important to make sure potential clients are spending time on your website and finding everything they need. If they are not and leaving right after finding your website or what is called ‘bouncing’ out, you will want to analyze the reasons why. Did the person not find that they were searching for, was your website too obscure and difficult to maneuver, or are you even targeting the right audience? All of these are questions to be asked if your Page View statistics remain low.

3. Referrers – Discovering how people found you is also valuable. Did your visitor come from a website that linked to your website or did they find you through a search engine? Which search engine did they use? Which websites are linking to you that is providing you with traffic? Did your visitors find you through social media such as Twitter, Facebook or a blog? These answers can show how well your website represented in the web world and on a global basis?

4. Search Terms – Once an analyst determines how people are finding your website and you discover it may primarily be through search engines, the next logical question is, what words or phrases did that person type into the search engine. A search term or search string can show you if the terms people are using are correct for what your website represents – for example, if you have a large number of unique visitors, a small number of page views and people bouncing off the minute they find your site, you may wonder why? If you are a company for instance that sells model airplanes and your unique visitors are typing in the word ‘model’ in search of models or even ‘airplanes’, not using the two words together, they connotation is completely different and you may not be finding your correct audience.

5. Entry and Exit Pages – Another piece of information a web analyst studies is which pages on your website are visitors entering through and exiting? Did you pull your guest in, guide them through everything you wanted them to see or did you lose them right away or consistently on a particular page? Understanding which pages your visitors are looking at can help you identify the high interest pages to the low interest pages of your website.

While these are just a handful of terms used by a website analyst, it may help the new and even seasoned website owner understand how to improve their online rankings.

Pamela Ravenwood is a copywriter for ArteWorks SEO. She is an award winning writer, journalist, SEO specialist and strategic planning consultant. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.