SEO Tycoon

**goheadtry** · 11:25 PM

Is my site doing good?

**vangogh** · 08-18-2007, 12:47 AM

I think it's more important to look at the numbers over a longer period of time. My guess is you'd like more visitors to your site. But don't always worry absolute numbers. Look more for the growth over time.

Say at the end of this month you averaged 45 visits a day. Do what you can so next month is 60 visits a day. And then 80 visits a day the month after. If you keep increasing things month over month one day you'll be amazed at how much traffic you're pulling in.

How much is good is really dependent on other things. What are your goals for the site?

Imagine your site sold one product which results in $1000 profit for you which a single sale. If you sold one product a day you're making $365,000 a year. If 10% of the people who visited your site purchased then 10 visitors a day is resulting in a pretty good living.

My guess though given the nature of your site is you want more traffic. But don't think of it as good or bad. Is your traffic more this month than last? If it is you're doing good.

**Astawicki** · 08-21-2007, 03:27 AM

Yeah Better then MY Site

**lajocar** · 08-21-2007, 06:00 AM

Your stats don't look to bad

Set yourrself short term goals e.g. 50 / 100 visitors a day etc.

If you can get to 10 000 + a month then you are doing very good

**goheadtry** · 08-21-2007, 02:00 PM

Here it is over time

**ForrestCroce** · 08-21-2007, 03:04 PM

What happened in April? And what part of Cali do you live in? I spent about six years in the Bay Area ... if you're in Northern CA it's probably the weather getting better, and people spending more time outdoors, less online. I haven't spent enough time in SoCal to know the weather patterns down there.

Over time your traffic is generally going upward, with a lot of starts. You have a copy of Excel? Pull this data in, and make two graphs of the # of unique visitors, the visitors to visits ratio, and the pages per visit ratio; one month over month, and one for the past 60 or so days. You can put the count on one Y axis and the ratios on a second, so you don't skew the results and make the graph unreadable.

You should also make a graph over time of your referrals by domain. The idea is you want more and more of them - you don't want to draw all your traffic from just one or two sources.

**Learning Newbie** · 08-21-2007, 05:36 PM

I don't know how to get those reports.

Do you use Google Analytics? It looks like it, from your code. Post that graph and I'll show you mine. I have to get some work done, but I'll pull one up before I go home so you have something to compare against. But consider that my site is a blog, only, and that I haven't done any SEO for it - I really want to run an experiment and see how content spreads organically.

Say, your home page says you have a blog - why isn't it linked here? Under "Latest Blog Post" on the right, under your name and avatar? I get traffic from people clicking that link whenever I make an intelligent post. Which is maybe twice or thrice a month.

**goheadtry** · 08-21-2007, 07:41 PM

I use AWSTATS and google analytics but I like awstats better because of the convience.

**Learning Newbie** · 08-21-2007, 08:01 PM

I don't have access to AWSTATS (oops! interesting typo!) so I can't help you compare. Analytics says zero every day for the past month, but that's not true, people are leaving comments, including p0rn spam. Anyway, you're kicking my butt it seems.

**goheadtry** · 08-21-2007, 08:20 PM

Wait make sure you input the code correctly in your pages.

**ForrestCroce** · 08-21-2007, 08:49 PM

I've moved this thread from the general forum after talking with goheadtry. There's an obvious follow-up question of how to increase traffic flow and diversity; this has been a recurring theme in the answers.

I'm gathering some info about my sites to help you put this in context and, hopefully, give you some ideas for how to measure you visitor-ship so you know what to improve. In the meantime - I'm also taking care of a few errands - you might want to have a look at this blog post by Steve, or VanGogh the "post impressionist" of the forum. I hope he doesn't mind me quoting from his article:

Quote:

The Engagement Factor = (Avg time on site (seconds) x Pages per visit) / Bounce Rate

What I like about the engagement factor is it makes sense. It measures page*seconds/visit which does sound like engagement. While time spent and pages per visit each aren’t perfect in measuring engagement, chances are as each value increases a visitor is interacting more with your site.

**ADAM Web Design** · 08-21-2007, 09:22 PM

Your traffic looks misleading. You seem to have a lot of crawler/bot traffic that is misreported as user traffic.

Do you track the games themselves? Are they played? Do people come back and play the games? That's where your real answer is.

**goheadtry** · 08-21-2007, 10:10 PM

Yes they do play the games they watch the movies also many people sign up for the forum because if they don't sign up they don't get all the graphics of the user pictures etc but when they do login they don't post much but they like looking at post and I can see different login time ETC

**vangogh** · 08-21-2007, 10:22 PM

John it does look like the stats are showing some growth. Adam is probably right that some of the growth is bots. When that happened to me I still saw it as a good sign since it told me I had at least grown to a point to gain their attention. Also some of the bots will be from genuine sites that have now indexed the site or possibly listed it somewhere.

awstats filters out some bots, but not all. Analytics helps to filter out more bots since they track through javascript. That's one of the reasons Analytics tends to show less traffic than awstats.

Look though for where you traffic is coming from. Look at the referrers and the search traffic and watch to see if that's increasing.

**stOx** · 08-21-2007, 10:31 PM

Bot activity is a reason i usually use some kind of javascript tracking too, Like sitemeter. While it may not count the few people who have JS disabled it does let you get a quick look at some general stats without them being cluttered with bot activity.

**ForrestCroce** · 08-22-2007, 01:16 AM

I don't think the raw numbers mean that much, or that a comparison is going to be very helpful ... but that was brought up and you seemed interested, so here's what awstats has to say about my photo site's blog ... if you look at the attachment.

What's more important might be how I analyze this traffic, and try to take advantage of it as best I can. The first thing to note is August 13th; I'm not sure what happened, but there was a minor and short-lived explosion. Stumble Upon isn't showing up as a significant traffic source, which would be my first guess ... that community loves photography. Anyway, my night photography tips blog post has logged 1,492 page views in awstats, or 1,264 in Analytics. There's a 40 % bounce rate - much too high - but people spend 1 minute 35 seconds on average here. Sorry, I lied; Analytics shows maybe 1/3 Stumble traffic, while Awstats doesn't show this. I've picked up some links from people who've found posts useful - example: http://www.gadgetmiser.com/CheatersGuide.html, and lots of email referrals.

If you can imagine the graph, this is pretty typical of social media traffic, and why it's not worth pandering to. It's great if someone else writes up a nice little review of one of your pages and sends a few hundred people your way, but it lasts a few days at max. Search engines are the same thing; the ranking formulas change over time, and you can see bumps and dips. The ultimate goal is to have people coming in from as many different sources as possible. Awstats shows 20 different domains sending my blog traffic, not counting search or email. If I manage to offend one of them, I probably still have people coming in from the other 19.

So, except for this blip a week ago, my traffic looks pretty similar to yours. My site is a blog with five posts; yours is a forum and a tech hub. As your forum grows, you'll find it has a self-seo property, as people link to answers to technical questions in your forums, and satisfied users recommend it to others. You should have an easier time with a forum than with a blog, in that sense.

Since part b to your question is implied - how do you steadily raise your traffic over time - look at the other attachments. Maybe 2/3 of the phrases I've optimized for in some form ... a few are random, and some are things that I need to write targetted articles about. Pricing photos, dealing with models, ad things like that, I'm not sure how I gained any visitors here, but I can get a lot more by trying to grab those phrases. You want to cross reference this against Analytics to see how well each keyword is performing, but the things people have been finding you under is a treasure trove of information.