Keywords in Logs

What to do with them?

[dirkji]

I've read a lot of times that one should keep an eye on his logs to see what keywords show up there.

But aren't the keywords in your logs the ones that you are already being found for? So isn't it better to concentrate on keywords that people are not finding you with?

Or am I missing the point here?

Dirk.

[benevolent001]

Hello dirkji

Let me put it in other way....you have made you wrbpage and adjusted kewords...meta tags ...engine crawled you and you are found for these keywords...now from the logs we have to learn how we optimised the pages for those keyowrds that SE was able to rank our page high for that keyword and repeat the process for all the other keywords for which we want to rank high...

With Regards and Best Wishes

[DerekH]

Yes, you're right, it apparently only tells you what you know already, but in addition, it can help you focus the website experience for your visitor...
Maybe one phrase goes to one page, and a similar phrase goes to another - I've seen that and been able to fix it be "un-optimising" a page (yes really!) so that the (less suitable) page is part of the visitor's whole visit, but not a point of entry.

One of sites has more searches for what we haven't got than what we have. That may make no sense, but I list all possible variants of my widget, and though I don't see a blue widget, few other people do either. So I can at least give the visitor a nice experience, with background info and as much help as a I can, hoping that some of them will then wander round the rest of my site.

One of my sites, by the way, is a free-information-only site, and the more I add to it, the more daft queries it also catches. I've even put a set of pages up that lists the daft queries where my site has come top simply because the visitor phrased far too complex a query and it was by luck that I had a page with all those words, usually in totally the wrong order!

But back to the matter in hand - yes, the logs apparently tell you what you already know, but the periphery of the envelope of searches is what matters - how people phrase their search - terms that remind you that there's another similar term you may not have optimised for...
DerekH