Forum Moderators: DixonJones
I have a hobby site that I run in a niche area with little competition in terms of search engine keyphrases - it's the site in my profile. Lots of keywords return only in the thousands or tens of thousands of results on Google. I use analog and relax to analyse my weblogs, and I was really surprised to see the stats below. Please don't be too hard on me as I'm only an amateur at this. :)
Referred by search engines: 6.79%
Unique search engines: 82
Unique query terms: 8586
Unique keywords: 2028
Keyword count: 57735
Referred by external URLs: 2.81%
Unique URLs: 1198
Referred by local URLs: 61.68%
Unique URLs: 474
Unknown referrer, direct from bookmarks, robots, and typed URLs: 28.72%
What are your stats like, and am I right in thinking this is an unusual referral pattern?
I'm really surprised at what I perceive to be low percentages on search engine and external URL referrals, and I'm slightly worried that I've been optimising the wrong keyphrases. (I have spent time looking at other sites that have left their free hitcounter stats open to public view, and I did get some good ideas from them).
I have an alternate theory to support the above stats, that most of my traffic comes from web regulars in my niche area who already know about my site and keep coming back. To support this
* Is the unknown/bookmark referrer stat of 28.72%
* The site has had 1200 requests for favicon.ico in the last two months, and I'm active in a couple of the bigger forums, where my site tends to be well known, and is regularly mentioned by other posters.
* Many of my pages have a lot of photo thumbnails on them, so if a visitor reads several pages, that could account for the local referrers being so high at 61.88% of the requests.
My site has a PageRank 5 home page, and currently serves around 650 unique hosts and 2500-3000 pages per day on average. The last time I ran a hit counter, page views were on the order of 1.25 to 1.4 times the pages served. It's only a hobby site, and I don't make any money from it.
Cheers,
Mike.
Travoli, thanks for that info. By 20-25% of SE referrals, are you excluding local referrals? If I do that, then my SE referral goes to 17.7% of all referrals that originate externally.
I'd also say that this site isn't completely established, although it has been around for just over a year. My inbound links, traffic, and mentions in forums are climbing in a way that suggests to me I haven't reached anywhere near all of my potential audience. Well, it is spring/summer now, and this site always gets more traffic through the summer, but there's a very noticeable trend on top of that.
Basically I'm satisfied with how the site has turned out, but I would want to do something about it if I'm missing out on keywords and thus SE referrals. I guess more keywords and phrases will come with time and more (and more varied) content.
TraceyR, this logfile comes from my web host, and is automatically produced by the Apache server. IIS can produce a similar logfile that can also be analysed. I simply download the log file on a regular basis, and then run programs such as analog and relax against that logfile. If you want to know where to download those programs, stickymail me (see top of the page) as we're not supposed to post URLs directly here.
If you hang out in the Google forum much, you'll have noticed that Brett_Tabke has mentioned several times that there's gold to be dug out of those logfiles. You can learn so much about what's going on with your website, and use that information to modify and improve your site significantly. It's really worked for me.
Cheers,
Mike.
