Why look at what is in log files ?
Raw log files contain all the hits generated by the traffic on your website. So any
file, page, image that was loaded on your site will have an
entry in the web log file. Most Search Engines or sites will
send information in the hit entry of the visitor they
send to your site. Google, MSN and most other search
engines will put a referrer information in the hit entry
of the incoming visitor. This referrer information
usually contains what the search query was and sometimes
where you were listed. This is important web site
traffic statistics you can use to improve your web site
traffic.
Log files can be used to find
the visits of the bots for example. Knowing the pages
that got crawled and how to get them crawled is
important. Knowing that Googlebot, msnbot and other bots
found your pages allows you to know what is going on
with your work and if these are properly linked and
found by the different web spiders.
With the server error codes like 404 and 301, you can
see if some errors were made creating links on your site
or from other sites. My friend Cygnus noticed he was
getting a lot of 404 hits for a non existent page. He
created a page to get the visitors on a real page
instead of his standard 404 error page and convert some
of these visits to sales.
It's also good to be able to see if some sites are
using your bandwidth. Some webmasters will just use
picture on your site to use on their sites, it's called
hotlinking. They don't
copy it, they link straight to your image so you waste
bandwidth giving the file to their visitor. If the image
is big and their traffic is high it can bust your
hosting bandwidth limit.
When you make a page for a key phrase you don't
always expect to rank for other search queries.
Sometimes you can rank for something you did not expect
and if you tweak that page for something else, you can
lose that unexpected traffic. Looking at the page hits
and search used, you can see these unexpected searches
and prevent losing them.
When you get hit for a listing on page 3 of Google
for example, it means that you might get much more
traffic being on 2nd or first page. Knowing about deep
listings and being able to tweak them to bring them
closer to the 1st page is a must.
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