There are five key web site statistics that every web site owner should pay close attention to:
- How many visitors? People used to get all excited about hits but you could easily have 100 hits from one visitor. The number of visitors though (usually tracked by unique IP addresses) gives you a really good idea of whether you’re getting the kind of traffic you need.
- What pages are people looking at? If you don’t know what’s popular on your site, you don’t know how to make it better. If a page other than your home page is more popular, you might have managed to get it ranked well in the search engines – another good thing to know.
- What search engines are sending people to your site and how many are they sending? With Google fielding around 75% of ALL searches, you typically get the most visits from Google. If you’re not, you can learn why and determine whether that is a good thing or not.
- What terms people are searching for when they get to your site? If you sell computers and find that people are searching for hair spray when they click through to your site, you’ve got a problem. If on the other hand, they are searching for motherboard, that is a good thing.
- What other sites are linking to your site? Google (and other search engines) love it when other sites are linking to your site. So the more sites that link to you, the better – at least if they’re the right kind of links.
You need to know these statistics to make informed decisions about your site. Do you know these?
