Real Web Site Statistics – Search Engines – Which Does Your Visitor Use?

Site stats of the SE used by visitors to my website for January 2009.

These statistics are from one of my web sites, a technical site giving factual information for students, engineers, industry and the like. Visitors each month are from over 100 countries and the Acorn demographics show the majority of visitors are in the A, AB groups.

The site showed over 480,000 page views in January and a million plus hits, though hits really mean nothing. Each page contains many items and each item is counted as a hit. You can see that in the tables below – there are far more hits for each country than there are page views.

Web site stats are full of detail and can supply the owner with a lot of information on what search string the visitor used how the visitor is using your web site.

When the site designer knows such information as which search engine was used, the type of operating system used, the type of web browser, the resolution of their monitor and how long they stay viewing each page, etc., the web designer can tune his site to meet their needs. However, until your web site is popular it is hard to gain sufficient data to make a decision. Therefore, I submit this data from my web site to help others with their design.

There is much discussion on the Net about search engine optimisation ( SEO ) and how different search engines look for different key data on web pages. Well, as my data shows, there is no need to optimise for any search engine other than Google. It is by far and away the most popular search engine with 88% of the searches so is the one to concentrate on. Also of note is the sharp rise in popularity of Stumbleupon.

There are many tutorials on how to adjust the content on your page to suit Google and I won't repeat such information here. But one feature often missed is simply to conduct a Google search and then to study the first four or five sites listed and see how the pages are put together. Look at the URL of the page. View the HTML code for the page and look at what has been put at the head of the page for title, description, meta tags and the like.

Make another search with the search string very slightly changed and see which sites are consistently in the top ten results and then study the construction of those pages. This will give you a very good idea of how the Google algorithm works when your site is spidered.

Never use an auto-submit software for the major engines - always submit your site by hand and only submit it once to each search engine. That is all that is needed.

Other articles in this series are stats for Operating Systems, Countries and for Browsers used by visitors .