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I thought I might share a little bit about using statistics to iteratively improve your design and SEO for your site. However, because I'm still learning and working through this process, any suggestions or comments would also be welcome.
Over the past couple of months, I've been going over some of my statistics from Google Analytics. I noticed that I had a ridiculously high bounce rate (where people visit and then leave almost immediately) and so that caused me to redesign my site in hopes that a new site design would help me lower my bounce rate. The redesign isn't complete just yet (it still needs some IE6 help and there are a few other little tweaks it needs), but so far the bounce rate hasn't lowered much more than a couple percent.
Now, I haven't been gathering data for quite enough time since the redesign to be absolutely sure, but preliminary results seem to indicate that the high bounce rate didn't have (much) to do with the actual site design. I don't have a ton of content yet and after looking at the keywords that are bringing visitors in from search engines, I find that most of my traffic is coming to read one article: my tutorial on Mootools, a JavaScript framework (that you really should check out).
I suspect that people are finding the tutorial and are either finding what they are looking for right away or more probably not finding what they are looking for and so they leave right away. So, after the redesign is finished, I'm going to try adding more content related to MooTools and making it more visible on the site and on the tutorial page, possibly through a tag cloud or related articles or both. The goal is to lower the bounce rate and increase page stickiness, presumably by helping users find what they are looking for in a more efficient manner.
Abstracting away from my site, what do you find are your most relevant statistics (aside from conversion rates and revenue)? Also, if anyone else has examples where they successfully improved their site by analyzing their statistics and testing iteratively, please share. If people are interested, after I make the changes, I'll post some results back here.
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