SEO Analytics has always been considered a very important aspect of successful SEO.

During the lifespan of your SEO Campaign it is becoming more important to focus on where your traffic is coming from and how to use this information to your benefit than it is to focus on rankings, this is due, in part, to recent changes in SEO such as personalised searches.

Understanding Data Sources

There are two main avenues to attract people to your website; they are Visit or Server Logs, in particular how to read them, and the other is being able to use real-time tracking systems.

Visit Logs

When someone requests a website address or IP address in their search, pieces of very relevant and very useful data are recorded in a log, which can be retrieved later by means of a log analyser which displays the information in a user friendly form.

The information logged records details about their visit, and what can be found is such things as the IP address or a date and time.  It also records the outcome of the request and where the visitor came from.  There is more information available, this is only an example.

If you only required a ‘snapshot’ or basic picture of who has been visiting your site, this is fine.  But, if you are conducting a major marketing campaign, this information is not sufficient.  Log Analysers cannot supply information about repeat visitors, nor can they supply information regarding keyword analysis, operating systems, transaction cycles and many other items considered vitally important for SEO campaigns plus it would take very complex software, and massive time scales, to provide this information.  So, it becomes necessary to find a better way to track visitors.

Real Time Tracking

Most web browsers are able to execute ‘browser-side scripts’.  What this is that when a web page is created a program code can be embedded into the web page that will instruct the browser to report on various information about visitor page views, it then sends this information to a remote database.

Then, when a person opens up a web page, the browser executes what is called a tracking script which has been embedded in the page.  This script tells the server to send all the stored information about the visitor to a tracking centre and then stored on a database.  The information will include such things as browser details, cookie information, name of the page that was viewed and how they used keywords.

The visitor will not even know this is happening.  When you request the statistics they will be sent to you in a user friendly format, and all you need to do is access the source code and privileges before you can upload these files to your hosting server.  This is about the limit to any technical complications.

Some might say

Some may indeed say that using Google SEO Analytic tools is useless, but scores of others disagree because it is said not to address the needs of a serious SEO marketer because of limitations to its technology, and for the fact that it does not support Log Files, but it does provide accurate data.  However, it may be best to use a variety of tools instead of just one, especially if you are looking to get the most out of your analytics tool.

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