Study your logs carefully.

There's gold in them thar logs!

[Mohamed_E]

My site is an informational site, and when looking through my logs I occasionally find an unexpected query. "How the **** did this query find my site? I know that I do not answer this question anywhere!".

Of course, the query found my site because the individual words of the query were on a page, and my site has enough PR to do well. The title probably was attractive to the surfer, so s/he decided to look and see what was there.

Whenever I see that I know that there is an unmet need. If that question were answered well elsewhere the surfer would not have come to my site. So I fill the need by (usually) adding one or two paragraphs to the appropriate page.

Today I ran into a specially interesting example, when I realized that I had been mentioning a worthwhile topic tangentially, but had never fully addressed it. I have just made additions to four pages; looking at the existing competition this is one small query that I will own as soon as Google indexes the modified pages.

As I write in the description of this post: There's gold in them thar logs. Mine it!

[killroy]

Also, look at those site search logs. and if you don't have one, get one. Avantage? You get to see queries that your site doesn't come up for, and you know that people who are interested in things related to your sites topic (or they wouldn't have found the site in the first place) also look for those searhc terms which tare not on your site...

Those should go straight on your content to do list. In fact, for a long while now my content production has been user driven.

A few "Question" forms with duly researched, thourough, personal answers give even more detail in what your visitors want. Of course those answers go up as articles and FAQs and quickly pay for themselves.

SN

[edited by: killroy at 12:55 am (utc) on Nov. 7, 2003]

[zooloo]

Excellent point Mohamed_E.

Before I had never seen that and now it seems obvious - so well spotted :)

"Give the customer what they are asking for"

Cheers.

Peter

[Mohamed_E]

Thanks, killroy, for pointing out the obvious extension to the site search logs. I often say that I get more out of the site search than my users do!

[operafan]

I thought that was what most webmasters do - studying the logs? :)

[pendanticist]

It is totally amazing what folks search for, it really is.

Part of my daily routine is to paste resent search strings into a browser. I not only to see where I rank within those results, but what they typed in as well. Facinating stuff.

Gold Mine?

Youbetcha! :)

Pendanticist.

[Reflect]

Reverse engineering (spelling?) is what I have called this. I actually have built sub directories of content just on finds in my log file. It has paid off quite nicely more than a few times.

Brian

[dragonlady7]

I did that for my employer's site, and have been sorry not to be able to do more of it. We have a Google site search on our site, so I'm not sure how to find the results of that.

But, going out on my own and hoping to build a number of Adsense-friendly, information-rich content-based sites, I'm very, very interested in figuring out what people want to know that I can tell them. ;D