Discover More About Your Website Visitors By Taking A Look At Your Server Logs
Many websites today take advantage of at least one of the different sorts of web analytics packages that are available in order to learn more about their website visitors, but nearly all webmasters have access to their website's server logs. The server log is a file that records who accesses certain files on your server, and while the information that is provided to you in the server log can be dense and hard to sort through it can also yield great insight into the true nature of the traffic and hits that your website is receiving.
While your web analytics package is able to give you some good information about your website traffic, it will usually leave out some crucial information such as the search engine spiders or web bots that are visiting and archiving your site. Depending on what sort of website you are operating, if it is extremely memory-intensive and requires large storage and bandwidth (such as rich media or streaming videos), web bots that constantly visit your site can possibly make your website hosting more expensive without any more real people seeing your website content.
It can also be a good idea to compare the information that your web analytics software is providing you with your server logs, because sometimes there will be inconsistencies that can show you what is really happening with your website. If there is some kind of major difference or anomaly between your analytics data and your server log data, this can be an indicator of a back-end issue or error that is occurring on your website. One great piece of information that your server logs are going to show you but you may not see on your analytics is how much bandwidth search engine spiders are taking up by visiting and archiving your website.
This is important to know because it can direct you to create new instructions for the search engine spiders within your web pages, so that they are not scanning unimportant or sensitive content on your site. It is also good to know because there may be certain pages on your website that you do not want to show up in the search engines at all (such as a digital product download page). Do not get overwhelmed by the seeming complexity of analyzing your website's server logs, but taking a look at them from time to time will give you insightful information about the nature of your website visitors.
About the Author
If you want to be profitable on the internet today, you must have your website listed in the search engines. If you are ready to get your website listed go to http://RickyWeber.com/Search-Engines/ to read about an easy-to-use tool called Search Engine Submitter that will submit your website to 500+ search engines.
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