Search Engine Optimization - What Can A Log Analyzer Do For You?

There a millions upon millions of websites on the Internet that advertise, buy, sell, trade, and share a plethora of products and services. It would be literally impossible to scan all of them. Realistically, the average person only visits sites they already know, or sites that appear high on the first pages of search engine listings.

If your goal is to use a website for business, you need to increase your site's relevance in order to push it to the front of the crowd when a user searches for keywords related to your site. This is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. There is a lot of software and tools available to aid search engine optimization; one of these tools is a log analyzer.

Here's how a log analyzer works. On each server, there are log files - this is where queries for websites are stored. Information pertaining to the visitors of a certain website are found in these server log files. However, due to the format used to record these log files, a log analyzer is required to read them.

The log analyzer can produce a lot of valuable data. For instance, using a log analyzer, allows you to determine the amount of unique IPs that visited the site, how many time the site has been looked at, how many people visited the site, and how many times a particular search engine led to the site. If you know how many unique IP addresses visited your site, you can find the number of unique requests to a server. As a side note, keep in mind that unique IP addresses do not always indicate unique visitors. Different resources requested from the site, such as image files, are also noted in this log file.

Additionally, a log analyzer can reveal how many people visited your site. For the purposes of this article, 'visitor' means someone who has accessed information files from your website. HTML pages, like those with the .htm or .asp extension, or data files, like files ending with .exe or .zip, are all included. Note that images and certain other files do not qualify as information files, and so are not counted.

Another valuable piece of data that a log analyzer can provide is the total page views of a web site. Also known as impressions, this number refers to the amount of HTML downloads from the site. This is generally a significantly larger number than visitors to the site - this is simply because most websites consist of multiple pages, and most visitors will browse more than just one page. This isn't always the case, though. On certain sites, such as those that primarily serve software downloads, often have much lower page views, since users only visit a single page.

Lastly, the log analyzer reveals how many entries to a site come from specific search engines. Those who reach a site via a search engine counted a regular visitors to the site. Using this information, you can determine which search engine is the most popular, since people usually choose their search engine based on the search engine optimization methods used by that search engine.


With all the data that a log analyzer provides at your fingertips, you can bring your site to the next level. With access to precise information about the traffic your site is bringing in and the search engines people are using to get there, you can further customize your content. You can discover what keywords are leading people to your site and the statistics of the sites that are bring them to you, and use these facts to your advantage. A log analyzer makes all this vital information easily attainable.

Proper search engine optimization techniques, backed up by the power of the log analyzer, can put your site in a class above the rest. You'll climb to the top of all of the best search engines, and your site will thrive.