60% more traffic

although bad ranking in serp's

[HuhuFruFru]

any ideas on this?:

my site which has about 250 sites at the moment got a PR5 after the last update (it was PR0 before), now my traffic has really increased in the last days, more than 60%! but what I'm wondering is: I'm doing not so well for my *main* keyphrases, so where are the hits from? I'm using awstats (with traffic I mean the category in awstats called "Links from an Internet Search Engine" with google, odp, lycos, alltheweb etc.)

[roscoepico]

Your best bet is to get your hands on your actual referers found in your raw logs in order to trace back where your traffic is comming from. Also as far as not doing well for your main key phrases, you would be surprised how much traffic a couple of what you might call less popular terms can generate.

[HuhuFruFru]

thank you roscoepico! where are the raw logs (what is it?)?

[estjohn]

I recommend installing AXS for a free, easy way to track referrers and other stats...Although digging through raw logs has it's uses of course, this has graphs and makes it a bit easier.

[xav.com ]

Make sure to password protect it too.

[annej]

I don't know if all Awstats are the same but mine has a list of search temrs people have used down at the bottom of the page. Click on 'full list' and you will get all of them. Even though a lot of people have come in on my most expected search phrases it is surprising how many different search phrases find the site.

Right now I am getting a huge number of people coming in on 'homemade christmas widgets'. It comes out #1 in the serps! I don't even have a homemade christmas widget on my site but do have some homemade christmas non witdgets that I made. They are on a page in a subdirectory where I put my personal homemade widgeting. So who is to know why these things happen. I can sympathize with all the people selling nice homemede Christmas widgets and non widgets who are wondering why my silly 'show my friends my widgeting' page is above them.

Anne

[HuhuFruFru]

yes annej, and that's the problem: i have this list of search terms people used and right now for example there are 260 different keyphrases and 325 different keywords people searched for and through them clicked on my site. but when i'm searching for these words in google, most of them are on the 3rd, 4th, 5th serp's site. so how is this possible? do people really go so far with the results that they visit 30-50 sites? i can't believe this...

[annej]

Although 'homemade christmas widgets' came out #1 in the serps as well as 'idgeted christmas non widgets','christmas widgets'was on the third page of the serps (#29) and it was the top search term by far. So people waded through all those listings before clicking on mine.

Anne

[Dante_Maure]

do people really go so far with the results that they visit 30-50 sites? i can't believe this...

In some cases, absolutely.

More often, people are not visiting every site in the SERPs, but reading the listings and clicking selectively through multiple pages.

I know that when I'm searching for long query strings on obscure topics I often need to click through a page or two before I even find a site that looks on target.

[BigDave]

I imagine, that on commercial sites, the people that are willing to wade through severl pages to find what they are looking for would give a higher conversion rate. But that's just a guess.