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The Importance Of Web Traffic Statistics

Understanding how to analyze web traffic stats can be important for a variety of reasons. There are a few tricks involved in interpreting the data, however.

Finding the most accurate data is easy. The best stats come directly from web hosting companies. This source, however, often provides more information than many can digest right away. The most important numbers to consider at first are the traffic stats that show on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

The numbers that come from a web hosting company are generally the most accurate in regard to a site's activity levels. Take care not to read too much into these numbers, however. It is important to dig a little deeper. Although it might seem like the more visitors on a site, the better, this isn't always the case. It's important to peel back a layer or two to find out what visitors do once they get on a site. This is the true measure of a site's effectiveness.

Many people make this mistake of confusing hits with the quality of traffic. Hits only describe the number of requests for information the server receives. Sometimes hits are nothing more than reflective of the number of graphics on a web page. If you have 10 images on a page, for example, the server will record 10 hits for a single visit. This makes hits alone not the way to go for analyzing traffic.

These numbers do tend to become a little more accurate with more traffic. The lower this traffic number is, the more likely the analysis will be skewed.

The key is taking the stats and using them to determine how effective a site is. One number to focus on is the length of time visitors stay on a site. If they don't stay long, there could be a problem.

In some cases, the problem turns out to be nothing more earth shattering than bad keywords drawing in the wrong traffic. In other cases, it could be the visual design of the site turning off visitors. Should your site be difficult to navigate or hard on the eyes, people might turn away fast. If you make the decision to tweak things to fix these issues, study the numbers again to see if the tweaks worked.

Stats can also be helpful to see if sections of a site work like you want them to. Should visitors navigate too quickly away from a page you think is important, you might need to improve the page or its incoming links. This works in the opposite, too. If a page that isn't that important is getting more attention than it deserves, consider moving better content to it since visitors seem to visit there naturally.

Learning to read stats and decipher them can be important for all sites. The practice is especially important for those who want to make money from their efforts. Using these numbers can really pay off in regard to tweaking a site to its optimum potential.

Stats can also be useful in regard to exit pages. Although you might have designed exit pages, like order forms, others will show up as exit points, too. Don't panic. This is normal. If a certain pages shows up too much, however, it's probably time to tweak that page.

Beyond visitor stats, it's also important to look at keywords. See which ones are brining in good traffic, for example, the kind that really wants to visit your site. If visitors are coming in via your site's primary keywords, you're doing great. Those keywords that bring in visitors who buy items, look at ads or so on are valuable words.

If there are a lot of visitors coming in via keywords that aren't central to your theme and they go away fast, work to eradicate them. Good keywords draw in quality traffic. Keywords that pull in people who don't want to be there and result in zero sales or revenue aren't worth using.

Stats do help webmasters gauge their site's effectiveness. They can even be used to help one see what areas can be improved on. Read them with care to learn how to best optimize the entire website.

Article Source: http://www.uberarticles.com/articles

Author Jeff Alderson is an expert on search engines and SEO. To increase online traffic, Jeff recommends using a variety of SEO software and strategies to increase online traffic fast. You can get a unique content version of this article.

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