So what is a referrer log and why is it important? Basically referrer logs help you analyze the traffic coming to your website

Whist each referrer log program may differ in different respects they will incorporate to some degree some of the following information:-

-Which pages were accessed the most or least. -The keywords which were used to find your site -The search engines which sent the traffic to you -The type of technology used by your visitors -Which spiders visited your site -What the average length of time was that visitors spent on your site -The number of page views per day -Any server errors -Which were the top entry and exit pages -The bandwidth. This is the measure of the traffic on the site. It is measured in kilobytes of data transferred. -A summary is provided which gives information on the activity which has taken place on a particular day.

So where do you get this information? By default many hosting accounts do not generally include referrer logs as a standard practice but they can be provided normally at an additional monthly cost

There are also relatively inexpensive FTP software programs available which can help you through logging into the host server.

A quality log analysis software program can help you read the information since the raw data is often rather cumbersome to read.

Is it worth the additional cost?

Many people would say that providing your traffic is increasing what is the point of analyzing further especially as this will take up more of your precious time.

The advantages are:-

By knowing which search engines are sending you the most traffic you can boost your optimization strategies by creating additional pages for other relevant keyword phrases. On the other hand if a particular engine is not sending you sufficient traffic then you can consider alternative strategies to rectify the position.

Analyzing your referrer logs it is likely that you will find certain keywords/phrases are more successful than others which means that you can eliminate those which are not pulling in the visitors with and replace with those that are.

However you should note that referrer information can be disabled on certain browsers. This is because in certain cases it may violate privacy.

Some software can also be used to block or filter out referrer information so as to keep websites private. This can result in other issues though as some web servers do not allow access to certain parts of their site to browsers that do not transmit the correct referrer information. The reason for this is to prevent unauthorised bandwidth or deep linking*

(*Deep Linking on the www is making a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on another website's main or home page. Such links are called deep links and are considered a violation of netiquette.)

Whilst there is some software that claims to overcome this issue it is not too effective as the referrer can be easily faked.

So is the use of referrer logs worthwhile?

Only you can judge but the more you can fine tune your marketing efforts the more successful you will be.

To YOUR success

John Beaumont