Where are they coming from?
For most sites, the largest single source of traffic will be AOL. For
the Web Developer's Journal (which is aimed at intermediate-to-expert
computer users), it's about 4%. Since AOL has a consumer slant, one
usually assumes that visitors coming from AOL are more likely to be
computer beginners than experts. The more your site appeals to the less
computer-savvy, the higher a percentage of AOL hits you should see. If the
thought of all those beginning Web surfers makes you see dollar signs, but
your AOL traffic is in the single digits, then here's an area to work on.
Make sure you're listed in AOL's directory, AOL Netfind, and consider
adding content that will make AOLers feel welcome (a big flashing logo
that says "Welcome AOL users?" - I don't know).
Behind AOL you'll see some of the other mega-ISPs, such as Uunet,
Mindspring and Netcom. Here's a tip for you: Our traffic from Time
Warner's Road Runner service has gone from zero to about 1.2% in a year or
so. I don't know what that means for building traffic, but it sounds like
a stock to buy!
Top Users
If your site traffic is high, then any entity that makes it onto the
list of top users is unlikely to be a human. Most of these will be either
a spider
or a cache. A spider is an
automated program that visits your site for the purpose of indexing it for
a search engine. Obviously, spiders are welcome, but they won't be buying
anything (a bit like journalists, actually), so it's interesting to get a
rough idea of what percentage of your traffic is being "lost" to spiders.
Some large ISPs "cache" frequently-requested pages (that is, store them
on their local machines instead of retrieving them from the Web each time
they're requested), in order to save bandwidth. Caching is an important
issue if you run an advertising-supported site, because page impressions
delivered from a server cache will not be counted by your ad rotation
software, and thus you can't bill for them (Actually, some of the
higher-end packages try to compensate for this in various ways. See my
comparative review of ad-management
packages. It's important to compare the traffic stats that your
ad-rotation package generates to the stats from the server log files. The
former should be lower by approximately the amount of impressions being
cached. If the discrepancy is substantially larger than this, there may be
some technical problem that you'll want to find and fix.
Visitor Browsers and Operating Systems
The more advanced analysis programs can give you a breakdown of your
visitors by browser version and/or OS. Some Web servers keep this
information in a separate log file, called a "referrer log" (traditionally
misspelled "referer").
Looking at your visitors' browser and OS versions can give you a rough
idea of how computer-savvy they are. Advanced users tend to have the
latest browsers, and are more likely to use NT or Unix. If a large
percentage of your visitors are using old browsers, and a large percentage
are coming from AOL (see above), then you may assume that many of your
visitors are newbies. Of course, this is not absolutely true, as many
employees of large companies have no choice but to use whatever browser
and OS version their IT department has decided to "standardize on."
As a rough guideline, however, this has two implications. First, if a
large percentage of your visitors are using older browsers, then take it
easy with advanced design techniques like Style Sheets, Java and
Javascript. Versions previous to 4.0 often choke on the latest doodads,
even if you have a script to detect
the browser type. Second, if you can get an idea of how tech-savvy
your audience is, you'll know what kind of content to concentrate on.
Top Referers
This is one of the most valuable sections of all. The first step in
increasing your traffic is knowing where your existing traffic comes from.
The two biggest sources of traffic for most sites are first, the search
engines and directories, and second, links to your site from other related
sites.
Those sites fortunate enough to be listed in Yahoo will usually find
that it is the top source of hits. If you ain't listed, get on the ball.
Yahoo is selective about what sites they list, and carefully and patiently
presenting your case to them is much more likely to yield results than a
massive Spam assault. There are some very good tips on getting listed at SelfPromotion.com, and also in the
little-known section of Yahoo called "How to Suggest Your Site".
If you are listed in Yahoo, but are getting only a small percentage of
your traffic from it, then you may want to try to modify your listing,
perhaps moving it to a better category, or making the site description
more enticing.
After Yahoo, you should see the top search engines listed (Excite,
Altavista, Lycos, Infoseek). There are a couple of places on the Web where
you can find the latest stats on the relative amount of traffic each of
these has (see Search Engine
Sizes). The order in which they appear on your traffic report should
roughly correspond to this. If not, then a problem with one or more of the
search engines may be indicated. For example, if the word on the street is
that Altavista is currently the most popular engine, but it's sending you
less traffic than Lycos and Excite, then your rankings on Altavista show
room for improvement.
Getting listed on the various search engines is only half the battle.
You also want to try to make your site come up as high as possible on the
list of results for your favorite search terms. Everyone knows to use
plenty of keywords
in your page titles, META
tags and body text (and even filenames and ALT attributes), but every
engine uses slightly different criteria for ranking sites.
The art of maximizing rankings in the various engines is an arcane one.
Some folks go so far as to build individual "gateway" pages, each one
optimized for a particular engine. Others are parted from their money by
sharpies who claim to have "secret formulas" for getting top billing. At
the WDJ, we type the URL of
the desired engine on rice paper, using a manual typewriter. Then we burn
the paper, while our staff all link hands and dance in a ring around it,
chanting and drinking a lot of wine. Snake oil and false prophets abound,
so think twice before committing money or time to any scheme for improving
your rankings. You'll find some common sense ideas for bettering your
rankings at Search Engine
Watch.
The advanced log analysis tools can tell you not only which search
engines are sending you traffic, but also what keywords people are
searching on to find you. This section can offer rich pickings. Are all
these keywords included in your META tags? Are there certain keywords that
you think should be yielding lots of hits, but aren't? What might you do
about it? Also, by comparing the same keyword across different search
engines, you can get some ideas about the differences in their ranking
algorithms.
After the search engines, you'll find listings for the various sites
that have links to yours (You have been politely asking for links from
related sites, haven't you?). The sites near the top of your list are your
buddies, so treat them well. Make sure they always have the latest info
about your site, and do them favors if you can.
As I've emphasized throughout this article, a high or a low ranking
here can be interpreted in either a positive or a negative way. Not only
should you try to reward those sites that send you lots of hits, you
should turn your attention to sites that seem as if they should be sending
you more than they do.
For example, let's say you sell a software package, which is reviewed
in two online magazines. One of them sends you lots of traffic, the other
a mere trickle. Why? Could you bribe the Webmaster of the second magazine
to give you a more prominent link? Could you offer to break his or her leg
if they don't give you a more positive review? Could it be that their
magazine just doesn't get much traffic anyway, so you needn't waste your
time with them?
By following links to pages that have links to you, you can often turn
up scads of other promising places to solicit links. If a "links page" has
a link to me, they may also have links to other links pages that should
also link to me, and those links pages probably have links to other links
pages... and on and on until the sun comes up.
This leads to one of the most important points of this article. There
are a trillion things you could do to improve your traffic, but you can't
possibly do them all. Careful analysis of your log files over time can
tell you what yields results and what doesn't. Use your imagination, but
above all, use your judgment. Spend the bulk of your time on areas that
yield the bulk of your hits.
So, happy hit-hunting, Webmasters! If you've found another way to glean
wisdom from your log files, drop me a line and let me know. Better yet,
visit my Web site, and rack up a few page impressions while you search for
my email address!
Further Reading
