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How Google's total ownership of the search market and increasing self-promotion at the expense of the rest of the web is making savvy online operators look at other promotional options.
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ANALYTICS

Software used to detail website traffic - including information such as visitor numbers, length of each visit, the source of each visit, popular pages and exit points.

Since the advent of commercial websites, website owners have naturally been interested to learn about the number and nature of their visitors. Initially, such information was based on log files - text files stored on the server that recorded the number of files served, the number of pages viewed and so on.

Whilst interesting, such information was sometimes misleading. The methods used to collect data meant that it wasn't possible to track anything more than numbers.

In response to this, several companies have created software that is collectively known as Website Analytics. This software is intended to improve the data collected about website visitors, and give website owners various ways to interrogate and interpret visitor behaviour.

Popular Software

Perhaps the most popular Analytics package is Google Analytics - a free service available to anyone with a Google account. Other popular tools include:

Further Reading

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    "Hi Cyndi You're going to find the same thing that a lot of people find when chasing rankings. Firstly, the hand-crafted jewellery market is very competitive because a lot of people are using the internet as their primary route to market - compared to selling at markets and craft fairs there's a potentially massive audience. That gives Google a big headache, because there are a million sites out there competing for its attention. Secondly, much of what determines their rankings comes from the history of the domain. If you've been going a long time, it says to Google that the business is well-established and therefore probably has a decent offering. Any brand new domain is going to struggle to get anywhere near the top of the rankings in the short term unfortunately. It's encouraging that Google is at least spidering and indexing your site, but you will have to do a *lot* of work in terms of content and link building to see returns in terms of rankings."
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    "Cheers Richie! If there's any questions you've got about anything, feel free to drop us a line. I'm a bit hapless about replying to emails sometime but we're always happy to give pointers Oh - and merry christmas!"
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