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Your website statistics offer lots of valuable information about your site's visitors. You can see which page they entered your site on as well as the exit page. You can also utilize the most important web stat: the keywords that your users search on to find your pages.
The time that you spend studying your log files is time well spent. Pay special attention to the keywords. You'll be surprised at some of the odd keywords / key phrases that you'll encounter. Make a list of these keywords and phrases. Then create a new page optimized for each one. This can be a major traffic builder!
When a user leaves your site, he does so for a reason. Maybe he found the information that he was looking for and moved on. Maybe he didn't find what he was looking for and decided to try looking somewhere else.
Getting users to enter your site is only half the battle. You also need to keep them around for a while!
If your logs show that most of your users exit on just a few pages, take a careful look at those pages and see if you can figure out why. Does the content fully match the search term used to find the page? If so, your traffic is well targeted. You should capitalize on this by placing links to related pages on the page. This will help prevent click-a-ways by offering the user additional information to compliment that on the page they just finished reading.
If the content doesn't match the search terms used to find the page, you need to make some changes to the page. Add content that is more relevant to the search terms.
By giving your users the exact information they're looking for, you'll keep them on your site longer and generate more page views. More page views translate into more sales and higher advertising revenues.
Next, look at the list of referring sites (the sites where your users clicked on your link to come to your site). Do most of your referrals come from just a handful of sites? If so, write some articles that compliment the themes of those sites and submit them to the webmasters. If the articles are accepted and published, you'll have more links from those sites to generate even more traffic.
Your raw log files provide a goldmine of web stat information that you can use to increase your targeted traffic. But you should also use a good website statistics or log file analysis script. These scripts place all of the related information together, such as referring URLS, keywords, entry and exit pages, etc. All of this data is presented in neat tables and charts for easy and quick analysis.
If your website hosting company doesn't offer raw log file access, you have 2 choices: change web hosts or use a web stats script of your own. You can find any number of great scripts (some hosted, some not) by doing a Google search on web stats. Most offer a free trial period and several are completely free!
Study your log files and website statistics daily. You'll learn a lot and continually increase your traffic levels if you apply what you learn!
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