TRAFFIC Understanding your Website's traffic logs is a crucial component of your online marketing mix. It tells you what your visitors do. If you understand what you're seeing, you can make some great strategic and marketing decisions, not only for your Website, but for your business as a whole.

Remember that a "hit" is recorded every time the visitor gets an image or some text from your site, what you need to know is unique user sessions, and how much time people spend on the site how "sticky" and engaging it is. If you have tons of traffic, but the average time spent on your site is less than a minute you've got a problem.

The most popular pages give you great clues as to what to offer more of. The least viewed pages may tell you that some of your content isn't as fascinating as you think, or this maybe a heads-up that your navigation isn't driving traffic as effectively as it should.

These are great reminders that not all your visitors come through your home page, so you need complete navigation on every entry point to your site. And if people are leaving from pages that you don't want them to, perhaps you need stronger calls to action in those areas.

These are the pages where a visitor looks at the site then leaves immediately. Since the job of your home page is partly to filter the traffic that's not right for you, there'll always be some of these. But if you have a splash page, and significant numbers of visitors don't stay through it perhaps it shouldn't be there.

This tells you which search engines are sending you traffic, and which of your advertising and linking strategies are working

Once the search engines have listed your site, these tell you what the really hot search terms are for your business. Pay attention to these.