Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a field which is on the increase due to the power of the web were online presence is important; but not just being present is important but how ranking your website gets and how many visitors get to your website. This is important to make your content accessible to more visitors.
Log files contain vital information that most SEO tools out there neglect. Server logs can offer you the full picture of what is going on. A server log is made up of all the hits that a web server receives, be it a success or a failure. A hit is not essentially a visit; a hit is a request for one particular resource. A page would be multiple hits for different resources (html, css, images, flash etc.).
In short log files contain a lot of vital information about:
- Search Engine Bots
- Your visitors
- Pages requested
and much more…
It this is important to analyze your log files carefully to get a whole picture of how your visitors are interacting with the site and how the bots fetch your pages for updated content.
Using this information you can:
- Detect any dead pages
- Detect any common spelling mistakes in the urls
- Sort out the server status codes
- Identify pages that are less visited
- Solve duplicate content issues
There is a lot to the above that can be achieved using log files. It all depends on the content of the log files. If you have referrer information you can also detect and determine from where users are coming into your website. You can determine the trail from one page to the other how they are flowing in. You can also check then why some referrers have better visitors than others.
Checking server logs for SEO should not be a one-time check but should be made routinely both when new content is added and also for maintenance. A vast amount of websites get most of their visits from organic listings and to loose these would mean that you could lose your business. So it is of vital importance that to check regularly and detect any trends before they occur.
