Log analysis - measuring seo success

If you are hosting your site with any hosting provider these days you will be given access to some form of website statistics. Make use of them! Depending on your hosting provider you will be offered anything from webalizer to Awstats to Urchin. Each one offers different ways of viewing your log files and may offer useful features such as the ability to track advertising campaigns. From a pure SEO point of view the important things to bear in mind when looking at your website statistics are always fundamentally the same:

• How did they find you?
• Where did they come from?
• Are they coming for the right reasons?

Check to see which sites and search engines are sending you traffic. Check to see which keywords and phrases are bring people in. If you are targetting a particular country or region, then Geo-IP tracking is a must. Webalizer is pretty hopeless at doing this, while the current release of Urchin relies on the ISP / IP's TLD or ccTLD to tell you where they are based. If you are looking for something fast and simple try Statcounter. The basic service is completely free and gives some very useful information in an easy to read format.