Just as it's important to monitor your search engine rankings it is equally important to review your web logs. While your search engine rankings tell you whether or not the search engines like your site your logs tell you whether or not human viewers like it.

Your logs should tell you what the most frequented pages are, how long viewers stayed on your site, how many pages they viewed before leaving, what their least favourite page is, what keywords they used to find your site, which sites are sending you the most visitors, etc...

Most web hosting companies will provide some sort of web site statistics, be it raw server data or a comiled report. (Note: if your hosting package doesn't include stats you will have to pay extra for it) Each reporting program is a bit different and it is worth spending some time figuring out what it all means because once you understand what it's telling you you'll know what your site's good and bad points are. Then you can work on fixing the problems.

In most cases, stats have to be set up on the server where the site is hosted, although there are companies that can offer the service remotely. If you don't have access to your site logs it would be a good idea to contact your web hosting company to find out what they offer in this regard.

Analyzing Site Traffic

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