Exporting data and working with it: optimize your website!
When you are trying to optimize your website the last thing that you want to do is to rely on guesswork. Instead you should be trying to track everything. Fortunately this is fairly easy to do. The more information that you have the better your results will be and the more likely it is that your site will rank well in the search engines.
One of the great things about working online is that when you build your website you have access to all sorts of data that you can use to help you optimize your site. The best source of this is your own sites statistics. You will be able to use these to determine not only how many visitors you are getting to your site but where they are coming from. The first thing that you are going to want to look at is how many are finding your site through search engines and how many are finding your site in other ways. If the majority are not coming from search engines you will have some work to do in terms of SEO.
The next thing that you are going to want to look at is which search engines they are coming from. There are several different search engines and they all have their own algorithm for ranking websites so the results on each will be different. Ideally you would like to make sure that your site is ranked at the top of all of them, although there are really only three that matter, Google, Yahoo and Bing. You may have to tweak your optimization to get yourself to the top of each of these search engines.
The last source of information that you are going to look at in your analytics is what search terms people are using to find your site. What you really want to pay attention to is terms that you are not necessarily targeting but which are still sending visitors to your site. That usually means that you are ranking for that term, although probably not at the top. This would be a term that you should start targeting right away as it will be a quick way to get visitors to your site.
One of the things to keep in mind when you are using your statistics to optimize your site is that you are going to want to watch for patterns. That means that you are going to have to keep a record of the data. This is why you should make sure that you are exporting the data into a format that you can save to look back on down the road. Most people find that a spread sheet is the best way to do this but you can use whatever method will work for you.