We’ve posted some articles on long-tail and on the commercial tool used to measure the long tail. As I’ve said before the Hit Tail program (script) merely measures the existing traffic that is coming to your site, it’s not the holy grail of keywords, but it is a useful tool that SEOs should include in their arsenal.
Hit Tail measures exactly what a quality web statistical program should measure, nothing more, nothing less. The information is the same, albeit delivered in a different package, but it’s the same. Here’s the point I’m driving at, there is plenty of useful information recorded in your server logs that should be extracted on a daily basis. Webmasters are sitting on a gold mine of data and many are unaware of its importance and existence.
As a webmaster you should have some type of program that will measure where your users are coming from and how they get to your web site. Most hosting companies will provide free analyzers, however, I have invested a bit more than free to acquire a log analyzer that I trust more than the free tools. (The free tools are certainly better than nothing. Awstats in my opinion leads the bunch, or at least trumps Webalizer.) If anything though, Google has provided you the powerful free tool called ‘Google Analytics’ which if you haven’t already, you should install on your web site.
Major web sites will use their own proprietor software, for your purposes Analytics is more than what you need. Plus you will be able to pull out key pieces of information like major keywords. Hittail won’t even be needed because Google will record you keywords in a similar fashion (just without the cool long-tail graph.)
The information in your logs is very important to understand the performance of your web site, it does not take special skills to interpret these stats either. Some simple things log programs will tell you are total daily visits, page views, bandwidth, etc. More important statistical info includes knowing which pages are garnering the majority of your traffic can help you understand what content is popular in the search engines (and your target market). Knowing what keywords people use to reach your site and which search engines are driving traffic to you are also important factors. You can also determine geographic location of your visitors, how many spiders visit your site, and what errors occur when users visit.
All of this information is available free of charge! Albeit, there are advanced statistical interpretations and programs that can help you identify new markets, trends, and so forth, however, to the new SEO, looking at your web stats should be a regular part of your daily business operation. Don’t miss out, don’t be lazy, learn more about your online business with your free log stats.
[tags]long tail, hittail, analytics, google, stats, web stats[/tags]