When we were young, we played with hit counters. Now we are grown, we need something more. Log-based web analytics programs are hit counters for adults.

Hit counters aren’t the only programs that count hits. In fact, many programs will record those file access requests, and perhaps the most popular ones are the web servers, themselves. Since it’s the job of the web server to serve up those files, it only makes sense that web servers like Apache and Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) would keep track of that activity. These logs routinely include details of browser visits, an example of which is reproduced below, with identifying information altered to protect the source:

pool-71-0-107-3.locfl.dsl-w.isp.net - - [01/Sep/2006:07:17:15 -0400] “GET /cgi-bin/page.cgi?g=New%2F;d=1 HTTP/1.1″ 200 7409 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6″
pool-71-0-107-3.locfl.dsl-w.isp.net - - [01/Sep/2006:07:17:20 -0400] “GET /cgi-bin/user.cgi?d=1 HTTP/1.1″ 200 8181 “http://www.sample.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?g=New%2F;d=1″ “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6″
pool-71-0-107-3.locfl.dsl-w.isp.net - - [01/Sep/2006:07:17:23 -0400] “POST /cgi-bin/user.cgi HTTP/1.1″ 200 7091 “http://www.sample.com/cgi-bin/user.cgi?d=1″ “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6″

These three lines were taken from the logs of an Apache server in Combined Log Format (CLF), recorded on September 1, 2006, at 7:17 AM EDT. They show the hostname or IP address of the connecting party, the date and time, the HTTP instruction processed (GET … or POST …), the results of the instruction (server response code 200 means the server found no errors in the request), the amount of data passed as a result, the referrer URL (where the request came from), the kind of browser making the request, and the PC environment running the browser.

Reading the log entries would give you a good idea of the kind of activity your site receives. The entries would easily let you learn how many visits your site has had, and you can see which pages are the most popular. By making note of the connecting host and the timestamp, you could follow a visitor through your site, and see what interests him or her. All it takes is a bit of digging through the logs. Most people, however, would probably find it time consuming and dull.

Sure beats log reading

It is this awkward presentation that led developers to produce web analytics software in the first place. Log-based web analytics software imports or reads the web server log file and produces a series of graphs and tables. These user-friendlier graphs and tables take much of the drudgery out of “counting hits.” Popular examples of log-based web analytics programs include Google Analytics, Webalizer and AWStats, best known because they are free products often used by web hosts as a benefit for clients.

It might be fair to classify Webalizer and AWStats as log readers, rather than analytics programs. Making web server logs readable is what they specialize in, after all. Webalizer starts with bar graphs permitting a comparison of site visits over the past year, along with a chart offering a summary of the major statistics over that same period. Clicking on a month gives you details on that month’s visits, all collected from the server’s logs. When you have nothing else, it’s handy, which is why (along with the price) so many web hosts provide it as a free benefit of hosting with them.

But there is more to analytics than simply restating the logs in a friendly manner. We’ll look at what the commercial log-based web analytics programs can do in a future blog.

Search marketing, like all online marketing, is very measurable. One of the great things about paid search, in particular, is how easy it is to launch a campaign and how quickly you can start measuring the results (often within 24 hours). We’ve put together a handful of top-line learnings that anyone can glean from their search marketing campaign. This helpful information ranges from learning what your customers want (in the language they’re familiar with), to testing and measuring the effectiveness of your messaging.

Your search marketing campaign can help you learn:

1. How to speak your customer’s language. One thing search has taught us over the years is that our clients’ and their customers can often speak very different languages. For example, you may call your product “financial planning”, but your site metrics and search campaign results may show (via conversion tracking) that your clients are looking for “investment help.”
2. That your web site needs improvement. Search ads are targeted – if they are effectively written and relevant to the keyword you are targeting, you can practically predict high clickthrough rates. However, this does not necessarily mean you are going to get high conversion rates. When you have a large amount of visitors, which are not translating to sales, the next step is to look at your web site itself. Are your landing pages relevant? Is your navigation intuitive? Are you targeting the right terms?
3. How to measure ROI. Analyzing the impact of your marketing initiatives is no small task, and can be overwhelming for a lot of marketers and business owners. Search is a great way to get your feet wet with marketing accountability. Both Google and Yahoo offer built-in conversion tracking so you can see the effectiveness of your media dollars in near real-time, down to the keyword level.
4. What your competitors are doing. It is almost impossible not to analyze some competitor activity when maintaining any type of search campaign. Organic SEO, in particular, is a great way to root out websites in your space and see what they’ve got that you haven’t got (and why they may be ranking better than you in the search results). It’s easy to monitor competitive activity with paid search too – all the ads are right there lined up neatly in a row, and services such as AdGooROO and KeyCompete are popping up all over the place to help you monitor your competitor’s search activity.
5. What messaging works. Paid search ads are a great way to test your messaging. Google and MSN, in particular, make it very easy to swap out ad copy and monitor ad effectiveness. Paid search ads are also a great way to test a new message before rolling it out to other (more expensive and less maneuverable) media channels.

Your client’s site is now ranking for some great keywords and is drawing a decent amount of traffic. You have ample traffic and your clients are fairly happy. Could you be missing anything? As a Search Engine Optimization Professional working on the prestigious “Little Red Wagon” account, you couldn’t be happier. You have hit keywords relating extremely well to the red wagon industry but is there something you’re missing? Are you missing the “where” in your wagon?

Have a look at the initial strategies regarding the Little Red Wagon Account:

1. It’s a Red Wagon
2. It’s the CLIENT’s red wagon
3. Who Uses Red Wagons
4  Types of Red Wagons
5. Different Red Wagon Uses
6. Product Benefits: It’s Red, The Wheels Stay On, etc.
7. What’s missing here?

Pitch to Local Traffic Using the SEO Geographic Strategy 

What’s missing is local traffic. SEO Professional Companies use local traffic to their advantage and enjoy the extra traffic (and conversions) this kind of marketing brings. However, it is amazing how many SEO companies miss this strategy completely. High local SE rankings are easier to obtain than broad search rankings. Even better, local searches are likely conversions.
 
Think in terms of where the product is available and add possible places where outlaying customers live. Optimize for:  provinces, states, counties, major cities, small cities, towns and half a-dot on local maps.

Geographic Targeting, The Hometown Advantage

The h1 tag is a great place to introduce local and regional names that will draw the additional traffic you want. You can also use Google regional ads (shown only to specific states, cities, or region of your choice.) Think also about Local Pay Per Click Campaigns. PPC can focus your ad marketing to a ditch along Main Street, if necessary. When you target local traffic, you give your client additional rankings for less-competitive city, county or state searches. This really is “The hometown advantage.”

Don’t target all areas at once. Let each page target no more than 3 or 4 local regions. If your client has distributors or representatives in different counties or cities, their individual pages are ideal for geographic optimization.  Be clear- don’t be overly repetitive with your geo- targeting text; and use that h1 to your advantage. Geo-searches are a goldmine…take the time to pan for local customers.

What’s good for the Goose isn’t Good for Google?

There has been a lot of opinions being bantered around online regarding the post Matt Cutts did about “How to report Paid Links”. The majority of the opinions fall into one of three categories: those for it (the ability to tattle tell), those vehemently against it (probably from those that over abuse it…just my opinion) and those that worry that their competitors will sabotage them by buying a bunch of blogs, reviews etc…

But what I am not seeing anyone write about is the fact that Google seems to be “pouting” a little bit and basically threatening to “take its bat and ball and go home”. 

I certainly do not want our client’s sites having to compete with other websites that have no business ranking in the top 10 organic spots. But if the sites that are ranking in the top 10 are relevant, and as long as they are not using black hat SEO tactics, why would Google want to possible “penalize” or in anyway take away that particular sites top 10 listing?

What’s that you say? Paid links is now considered “Black Hat”? Well, I would agree that some paid text links should be considered black hat…Having run of site text links where one website that has 3,000 pages and offers links for sale in the footer and is not on topic should not be an acceptable tactic and I think Google has done the right thing by modifying their algorithm to detect and then ignore (meaning the link is neither good or bad for the site…it’s just a waste of money for the site owner unless of course they are getting quality traffic out of it).

However, now that just about everybody in the world knows that anchor text links are an important part to Google’s ranking algorithm, and being that most business websites do not freely (or very visibly) link to other websites (how many other websites do you link to or promote on your business site? Didn’t think so) site owners are going to push the envelope as much as possible and with good reason. They have a lot to gain by getting top rankings for quality (relevant) keywords to promote their business.

Google needs to understand (and I think they do or they would not allow the Matt Cutt’s of the Googlesphere to blog like they do) that businesses every day count on the search engines to produce revenue. Google is no different. $465.26 per share at the time of this writing for 1 Google Share? And where does 90% or more of the money Google generates that makes the stock worth that much? A form of a text link ad.

Ok so let me for a moment a self appointed mediator between Google and the Website owners…

First let’s understand Google’s position. Google, the webmasters of the world understand that you can not afford to have your top 10 results be cluttered with non relevant websites. Doing so would only lead to your demise as your own search volume would rapidly decrease, leading to less money made through your primary business model.

Webmaster’s position: Our very existence seems to be connected to how well our search placement is on Google (and Yahoo and MSN) and not having top rankings for relevant keywords seriously effects our bottom line in a bad way.

Mediator:

Webmasters: Agree to follow the webmasters guidelines and understand that getting top placement is more often a marathon and not a sprint. If you truly deserve to be in the top 10 and your company is one of the best companies for your industry, stay at it and do all you can with in the guidelines. Hire outside help if you need to that has the experience to help you.

Google: Keep up the great work of making sure those that are not playing fair, get the boot so that those that are playing by the rules have an equal chance. But please do not punish those who find out a “secret ingredient” to your algorithm and then use that ingredient to benefit their ranking. If the results in the top 10 are relevant, who cares? I don’t ever remember Google crying “foul!” when title tags or h1 tags were discovered as being important.

Getting quality links is hard to do. And maybe that is why it is such an important part to your algorithm. But considering it “spam” when a webmaster or seo or owner of a website pays a blogger to post about their business in order to try and rank better for keywords that are relevant to their site? They are just doing everything they can to make sure they can put food on the table for their families. Instead, if you sense a threat to having this “ingredient” well known, improve the recipe. Chances are you will come out with a better meal for everyone.