Web Promotion - Web Development and Design Foundations with XHTML - page 514

Figure 13.5
Partial log file
analysis report
“quotations” and “educational” are the most popular keywords on Yahoo! for this
particular Web site. The developers of this Web site could add keywords related to these
keywords or common misspellings of the most popular keywords. Improving the
keywords may increase the number of visitors to the site. Some search engines routinely
revisit sites that they have listed. Other search engines must be explicitly notified to
revisit the site to pick up the new keywords.
Google offers a free Web analytics service at http://google.com/analytics. The categories
of reports provided are as follows:
● Visitors (including a geographical map and browser information)
● Traffic Sources (such as referring sites, keywords, and AdWords)
● Content (including landing pages, paths through the site, and exit pages)
● Goals (tracks business objectives)
Another option is to purchase a program that can help you monitor your search engine
positioning. Applications, such as WebPosition ( http://webposition.com) , can create
reports of your search engine rankings, analyze and track keywords, and even submit
your sites to search engines.
13.7 Link Popularity
Link popularity is a rating determined by a search engine based on the number of sites
that link to a particular Web site and the quality of those sites. For example, a link
from a well-known site such as Oprah Winfrey's ( http://oprah.com) would be consid-
ered a higher quality link than one from your friend's home page on a free Web server.
The link popularity of your Web site can determine its order in the search engine results
page. One way to check which sites link to yours is to analyze your log file. Another
method is to visit a Web site that offers a link popularity checking service (options
include http://linkpopularity.com and http://linkpopularitycheck.com ). These sites will
run a report that checks link popularity on a number of search engines. A third method
is to visit particular search engines and check for yourself. At Google and AltaVista,
type “link:yourdomainname.com” into the search box and the sites that link to
yourdomainname.com will be listed.