Many knowledgeable small business owners rely on search engine optimization (SEO) companies for evaluating their website traffic. SEO and analytics definitely intersect; however website traffic analysis is not just about tracking clicks. An in-depth website traffic analysis should incorporate a traffic analysis strategy. A typical website traffic analysis strategy will include:

• business metrics
• custom reports
• actionable traffic analysis
• optimization recommendations

Such analysis is essential for any website as it lets the owners know the reason why, and how, people are coming to their website. With a good understanding of your marketing channel, owners can tie business metrics defined by their organization into their strategy.

In terms of reporting, of course reports are great but you must have someone on board to interpret the information into useful data. Also, it’s essential to share the custom reports with the team. Lastly, without optimization recommendations, a website traffic analysis is only part of the puzzle. It’s great to know that you have 200 visitors per day, but it’s even better to know that 10% of the 200 visitors made purchase after the second visit and viewed at 10 pages on your website.

AW Stats Web Traffic Analyzer Report number of “human” visits Report unique “human” visitors Report entry pages Report exit pages To see a complete list of features, visit AWstats on sourceforge.net

Focusing on the areas that require improvement, once your metrics data is analyzed, will permit you to transform your business and respond to market behavior. Even though, most hosting companies include web traffic tools, these tools will lack the ability to deliver in depth insight. Nevertheless, it’s including in your hosting package, so you can begin your web analytics venture here.

When you are ready to take your business to the next level and gain a better understanding of the customer experience, then move into website traffic analysis that includes more that just click data. Website traffic analysis is fundamental to online business and without it, your business is ultimately disadvantaged.

First, let’s revisit the definition of anchor text. According to Wikipedia Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.  Anchor text can be found in your static or dynamic web pages, product pages, blog posts, PDF files, directory submissions, web forms or any piece of hyperlinked content.

Since the hyperlinked text helps search engine spiders to understand what your page is about, your anchor text is a way telling the search engine spiders to  “pay particular attention to this content – it’s important”.

An anchor text check up has one distinct outcome,  you will uncover new opportunities to spice up your anchor text and thereby improve your visibility in search engines. When your anchor text is carefully written, you can see an increase in organic search engine traffic. Organic traffic is the free search engine traffic. Even better, when you combine an external link building program with an SEO anchor text check up, can look forward to improve placement within the leading search engines.