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Clickstream Data Warehousing Companion website for the book by Mark Sweiger, Mark Madsen, Jimmy Langston, and Howard Lombard Published by John Wiley & Sons, January 2002 |
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| What Is Your Site Promotion Strategy? Searching for an Answer |
| By Mark Sweiger, President and Principal, Clickstream Consulting This is the third in a series of articles that focus on the application of clickstream data warehouse technology to an e-business environment. In this installment we examine Internet search engines. No matter what kind of e-business you run, there must be a good answer to the question, “How do I drive traffic to my web site?” As we noted in the last month’s column there are 10’s of millions of web sites already on the Internet, and the statistical odds of anyone stumbling upon your place of e-business gets slimmer every day. You must invest in various kinds of e-business site promotion techniques to get the traffic to come your way. Internet site promotion comes in many forms, not all of which are under the direct control of the e-business. The prime example of this is search engines, which provide a path to your site’s content assuming the search engine indexes your site. Getting search engines to index your site is not necessarily automatic or timely, and what they index is problematic-subject to the widely differing indexing approaches of various search engines. There is also the issue of your link’s position in the search order for a particular query. Obviously, you would like to have your site as close to the top of the list as possible for relevant search terms. If your placement in the list is too low, beyond the first ten results, statistics show that there is very little likelihood that your link will ever be seen, much less acted on, by search engine users. Suppose you put up a new Web site this month. You may be surprised to know that it will typically take at least 8 weeks for search engines to index your site, and even then your position in the search order for popular search terms will likely be far down the list. Worse yet, it may take much longer than 8 weeks for indexing if you do not manually submit your site to the search engines to get on their indexing queues. It is very important to submit your site to all of the search engines on a regular basis until your site traffic builds enough that the search engines seek it out as a popular destination. But even more important is the design of your web pages to highlight certain keywords that users will likely use to find your site. Site pages must be designed to highlight appropriate search keywords that get your URLs into the Top Ten search order positions for the most widely used search engines. Let’s illustrate this problem with an example. Suppose your e-business had a new product that was used to do clickstream log file analysis. A good home page keyword for the search engines would seem to be “clickstream”. You can test this keyword to see how often it was used as a search term in the prior month at the GoTo.com search engine site using the following GoTo “Suggestion Tool”: http://inventory.go2.com/inventory/Search_Suggestion.jhtml At the time of this writing, entering the keyword “clickstream” produced the following statistics for all indexed search term phrases containing at least that keyword:
This means that in the prior month, there were 108 search queries on the term “clickstream:” to the GoTo.com search engine. But the statistics show that the second most used search term, “clickstream analysis”, was used 54 times, meaning that this phrase would also be a good keyword to emphasize in homepage content. But, before we get too excited, let’s test the name of the most popular commercial clickstream log file analysis tool, WebTrends, as a search term. Without reproducing the entire table, the term “WebTrends” was searched 1,470 times by real users during the same time period, more than an order of magnitude above more general terms like “clickstream” and “clickstream analysis”. |
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