*** Number of requests.
Although your site may receive say, 200 visitors in a single day, the actual number of requests will be significantly higher. Since (we hope) your visitor stays for long enough to read (at least) your entry page, every subsequent page requested will generate another request that will be logged in your server log. Therefore, 200 visitors to a site looking at 3 pages each would actually generate unique 600 requests in the log file.

*** Number of visitors.
The importance of visitors to your site cannot be under-estimated. This simple statistic will go some way to helping you understand exactly how popular your site really is. If your site is aiming to sell products or services this figure will tell you exactly what the ratio of visitors to sales is. Analysis software will break this figure into day/week/month/year breakdowns too.

*** Average time visitors spend on your site.
Every time a page is requested from your site the time and date is recorded too. Calculating the time difference between requests of pages can give you a greater understanding of how long visitors are spending on each page. Are they merely scanning the page looking for interesting links or are they actually reading the actual content? Are visitors failing to understand your navigation design and leaving due to boredom or having to wait too long?

*** Frequent Visitors
Since everyone connected to the internet is assigned a unique address it is possible to identify visitors returning to your site day after day. This can sometimes be misleading information since major ISPs such as AOL often re-use the addresses assigned to users when they connect to the internet. Simply, it may just tell you at the simplest level that 80% of your visitors are coming from AOL, useful if your marketing a product to users of AOL client software!

*** Referring Sites
After working for so long exchanging reciprocal links with other sites of interest its probably worth your while understanding which ones are bringing in the traffic to your site and which aren't. Personally, I was amazed to discover once that a site I considered pretty lousy on the scale of things was actually bringing 50% more traffic than the other high profile sites I had exchanged links with! Of course, not just reciprocal links apply here, don't forget your positions in the search engines and directories you registered your site in (didn't you?!). They will also show up here indicating how many people are finding your site via conventional keyword/phrase searching.

*** Visitor's Countries
Speaks for itself this one. If your were marketing a product to a particular niche market for example 'coach trips to Spain from UK destinations' wouldn't you like to know that the majority of your traffic is coming from UK ISP's or not as the case may be. If your not reaching your target market geographically it wont be surprising if your sales are low!

*** Visitor's Browsers
It may be useful to know that the majority of your visitors are viewing your site using state of the art browsers so you could implement that new feature of HTML you've seen in that magazine article. At the opposite end, it could prove to be fatal to implement features into your site which are not supported by the majority of your visitors who happen to be using older browsers which don't support modern HTML extensions.

*** Summary
I expect that is enough to whet your appetite on what is in store for anyone with access to their log files. Analysis software can identify a lot more besides what I have mentioned here - you may be truly surprised about what your missing.

Finally, I mentioned in the introduction that I would give you advice about how to get log files if your host doesn't provide them:
     http://www.gumball-tracker.co.uk
This is my site! I'm currently beta testing the software now, a lot of sites have signed up so far and everything is proving quite stable indeed. Come along and get the information that you need to give your marketing and promotion efforts a push in the right direction. Sign up takes a few minutes and requires you give a few details about yourself and your site.
BTW: Gumball Website Tracker is FREE too!

Check out these sites for links to suitable software:

http://www.winfiles.com/apps/98/servers-webstat.htm
http://www.davecentral.com/webstat5.html

Be Organized

The first thing you must do before initiating any sort of promotion plan for a website, small or large, is to be organized. Yes, I know this sounds easy but believe me in practice the discipline required here can prove quite an obstacle for some of us! The objective of this article is to present some ideas that I have used to successfully promote websites.

I believe these often overlooked secrets about successful website promotion are essential for any long term success. Put simply, you will avoid making a hash of things and possibly (virtually) embarrassing situations!. Lets all of this into a real life scenario:

"Some time ago you sent an email to a site which contains a page of links to sites similar to yours. Seeing the obvious benefits of being listed on this high traffic site you emailed the webmaster asking for your site to be added to this hot list of links.

Not having made any notes about this action you took, you unknowingly forgot all about it. A few days ago upon reading about this hot link site (again) you repeated your email request for a reciprocal link. The recipient of your email checked his site and found your site already listed! Two minutes later a polite-but-angry email is making its way to your inbox. Oops!"

This sort of mistake is so easy too make and can be avoided simply by organizing yourself better. And yes, in case your wondering Ive made exactly that mistake myself!

So, how can you make life easier on yourself and stop wasting time which can be better spent searching for a new recipicoral link or replying to requests for information?

Well, the first step I always take when launching a new website is to create a file called detail.txt. In this file I setup several headings on the lines of:

• TITLE,
• URL,
• EMAIL,
• KEYWORDS
• DESCRIPTION (SHORT) and
• DESCRIPTION (LONG).

Now, the second thing I do is create a copy of a spreadsheet which contains a master list of search engines and directories. The top row of the spreadsheet defines the title of each column, they are: NAME, URL, DESCRIPTION, DATE SUBMITTED, COMMENTS and LISTED?. These column names give you obvious clues about the contents of each. Every row in the spreadsheet consists of all the details about the various directory or search engine I am going to submit my site to.

Next up is the email signatures that I will be using to support my various email campaigns that I intend to draw upon. A simple text file called sig.txt will suffice. In this file I prepare half a dozen email signatures that I can call on depending on the posting.

Additionally, I need another spreadsheet which will contain a list of websites that contain lists of links or maybe contain suitable material that my customers may be referred from. The top row of this spreadsheet defines the column titles as: URL, EMAIL, DATE, LINKED?. As before, each entry contains the details for each site that I have identified as a potential source of visitors to my site. Working through this list I can contact each webmaster individually offering my website as a suitable link from their site.

Finally, I also keep another 'scrap book' file which contains random snippets of information that I may find as a result of surfing or reading emails etc.

Now grouping all these files together in an appropriate directory on my desktop I have access to all the information I need to successfully implement my plan. Obviously there is no point in preparing these files without keeping them up to date with the results that will come your way. Of course you can always expand this type of setup to include the results of award sites you may submit to, or even mailing lists/newsgroup postings/news digests that you may be involved with.

Now with all these various files at hand in an easily updatable fashion I find whenever I am involved in any type of promotion or just random surfing I can always add information to the lists of just store useful bits of information in an easily accessible manner.

Hopefully I have given you some starting points about how you can make your life much, much easier when promoting your websites. It certanily works for me so why not give it a go, you can always fall back on scaps of paper, human memory and post-it notes if things don't work out!

Kind regards,

James

James Graham FREE server logs for any site, anywhere. Track visitors: arriving, browsing, downloading and leaving your website. Register now!      http://www.gumball-tracker.co.uk/

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