Website Statistics Report: Search Engine Keywords
Overview
This report shows you what search terms are used on the major internet Search Engines that result in visitors being directed to your website. Optimising your website to work with Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN / Live Search is one of the significant factors in website design and online content writing. This report can help you in the optimisation process because it shows you a list of search terms that have been used to locate your site and so can be used not only to measure success but highlight where the website is already doing well in the Search Engines.
This document does not go into detail techniques for optimising your website to work with Search Engines, as it is a bit of a black-art and is already the subject of a quite a few books, but from a high-level here are some things to bear in mind:
- Work on the Keyword Density. This is the number of times that a word appears on each page and in total on your website. In terms of this report it is the number of times each Search Term appears within the pages of your website. So a good exercise is to take these words and use them more frequently (within reason of course).
- The number of links to your website. These are ranked by quality as well as quantity, so one link from a major Internet player, such as www.bbc.co.uk may be as good as 20 links from personal home page type sites. The referrer report can help you here.
- Build Quality of the website, for example compliant HTML. Search Engines will check to make sure that the HTML of your websites is compliant, so it is worth checking this as you develop your website.
- Make sure the navigation between the pages of the website is clear and consistent, for example include a site map.
Search Engines are continually adjusting their algorithms so it is worthwhile keeping a close eye on this report. Use the date selector to monitor for any new or lost search terms.
Validating Search Engine Optimisations
This report is very useful to determine the success of any keyword optimisations that you perform on your website. If you are attempting to optimise your website for specific Keywords and then subsequently they do not show up on this report then you have to consider that your optimisation techniques have not been successful. The opposite of that is when they do start appearing on this report, which of course is great!
One caveat to that though is that Search Engines do take time to update their indexes as first they need to re-crawl your website then update their index. This process can sometimes take up to a couple of months so the process of optimisation can require steady nerves!
Keyword Advertising
If you are planning to take out any Keyword based advertising, such as Google AdWords then use the Keyword report to help you build your list of Keywords.
Report Options
As with most reports you can choose the date range that this report runs. There is also a printer friendly version which is available by clicking the icon in the top right of the report.
How this Report Works with the Log
Log size is very important to this report as each log record represents the data for one session. If your log is full you will be losing the oldest record with each new visitor so increase the log size to store more data and analyse trends further back in time.
To understand how to get best use of this report read
Managing Website Session Log help document.
Optimising your site for this Report
The search terms that are used to direct visitors to your website from the Search Engine are only available on the first page the visitor views from the website. Because of the nature of the Internet this could be any page within your website, therefore to get the most out of this report it is essential that you make sure you have installed the tracking code on every page of your website.
Other than that, by ensuring that your log is as big as possible you won’t lose any data once your log becomes full.