Traffic Monitoring
Whether starting a new web presence or optimizing an existing site, the first and most vital tool is the ability to monitor the traffic or number of unique and repeat visitors to your website. Obviously this is to measure any increase or indeed decrease of visitors to your site based on any changes or marketing experiments you have running at the time.
A good way to monitor your sites traffic is to use multiple sources (reliable). Elovation advises using the following in combination with each other.
a) Sitemeter
B) Google Analytics
C) Alexa
Each of these has its own strengths and weaknesses, however when used in conjunction with each other they pain a relatively comprehensive picture of your sites traffic and current situation with in its marketing environment.
Sitemeter:
Sitemeter Basic is a fantastic and simple way to monitor all traffic, both legitimate and illegitimate hits to your site. Its strengths lie in the following points:
a) It shows the geographic location of visitors to your site. This is most handy if you wish to ascertain whether or not you will provide services to a visitors exact location. Perhaps they are out of your range?
b) It shows the search term used by visitors in search engines to find your website. Please take note of this fact, as we will be referring to this in many more sections and videos, because what better way to generate keywords, than to compile the ones entered by your visitors!
c) And it shows the referring URL – allowing you to monitor which back-links you have created are performing well and which are of little significance.
d) The entry page and exit page of every visitor.
All these point are summarized in the details page allowing for quick analysis of significant daily traffic data that makes Sitemeter a good feather in your SEO hat.
Google Analytics:
This section will be explained in a separate article devoted to Analytics and Goal Conversions
Alexa:
Alexa is the site to go to, if you want to know what your standing is in the big scheme of things. It also very important because it allows you to see a rough estimate of how much traffic you competitors are receiving on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. This can be priceless information if you are in a niche market as some website mite look fabulous but are in actual fact receiving very little traffic.
It is important to note that there is in fact a lag time of around 2 weeks to 3 months depending on how popular your site is with regard to the figures shown. This is not the case if you happen to have a site in the top 500,000 or so, however this takes considerable amount of work if your starting from scratch.
For more information and tutorials on this subject feel free to visit Elovation [http://www.elovation.net/blog] and discover new tips, tricks and the latest news concerning SEO, PPC, Web Design and Internet Marketing.
