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dennis
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any way to see site stats for site you don't own? - 1/16/2006 9:56:01
I probably know the answer, but is there any way to see traffic stats for a site you don't own? In this case, it's not a competitor, but a company offering to use their site to lead people to ours. Our site is a (golf) country club and a company is trying to sell us a service that uses their site that gets "thousands of hits per day" to direct golfers to our site. Is there any way for us to find out if the numbers they are claiming are true?
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Tailslide
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RE: any way to see site stats for site you don't own? - 1/16/2006 10:38:20
You could ask them to prove it by showing you site stats etc but I'm guessing these can be faked.
Your best bet is probably to speak to other clubs and see if the service has been any use to them - and make sure it's not just clubs who have signed up recently but ones who've been getting an on-going service for a while. At the end of the day even if their site gets thousands of hits a day, if that's not brought other clubs any increase in business then I think it unlikely that it will bring you results either.
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dennis
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RE: any way to see site stats for site you don't own? - 1/16/2006 11:06:20
Thanks tailslide. Your suggestions are pretty much what I had in mind, but was hoping there was some way we could verify site traffic ourselves. Thanks again.
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coreybryant
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RE: any way to see site stats for site you don't own? - 1/16/2006 11:35:44
You might ask for a few days logs - that might be a lot better & a bit more time consuming to fake.
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Mojo
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RE: any way to see site stats for site you don't own? - 1/16/2006 13:10:12
Traffic is easy to fake and there are niche services out there to help you fake that traffic so beware of traffic as a metric. Try getting them to forward that traffic to you for two weeks. I would offer to pay them for a 14 day tryout. If they really have targeted traffic they shouldn't have a problem with it.
During the trial you should be tracking all sales and leads (you do track all sales and their sources, right?). If the site is sending you traffic that converts into sales then you know they are telling the truth.
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dennis
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RE: any way to see site stats for site you don't own? - 1/16/2006 13:39:39
good ideas again Mojo. As for tracking sales.....lol. It's a funny situation. In addition to being webmaster I'm a 26 year member of the club, and built the site originally about 6 years ago with the club's backing, but did almost everything on my own, including determining what pages were needed, text, even took the pictures. I've tried to nudge them into using it more aggressively to market the club to prospective members and to outside golfers, but haven't had much luck.....until recently.
The new board of directors has gotten real excited about using the internet (ie our site) as a marketing tool, and now want the sun and moon and stars. This is fine with me, but suddenly they're listening to companies that are promising all these new leads, and the site that I've built and supported www.lakevalleygolf.com is in some danger of being replaced. I think I've pursuaded them to realize that if they will put the same support (ie effort) into our current site as they would require for a new site that we can accomplish similar goals. The question about reviewing another sites traffic is in response to our GM asking me if there was a way to find out if what one of the prospective vendords was promising was true. Thanks again to everyone.
If you're so inclined to take a look at the site and offer any suggestions as to what we can do to use it to pick up golfers, those suggestions would be appreciated too!
www.lakevalleygolf.com
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Mojo
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RE: any way to see site stats for site you don't own? - 1/16/2006 15:15:18
Your first step should be tracking conversions. You should be able to point to the source of every conversion (obviously due to technical issues not all visitors pass referring data). You should be able to provide referring domains and any keywords used if the converted visitor originated from a search engine. These conversion numbers will become your benchmark and once you have this information you can start to make changes as you can easily tell if you're having an improvement - or not.
I am always amazed when management is willing to scrap an old, established site in favor of something new that comes with nothing more than the hot air of promise - or worse yet - the stench of potential.
Here are a few observations based upon the phrase 'lake of the Ozarks golf' (I'll just refer to it as phrase below).
On the homepage phrase is only found in the Meta tags. You should try and work the phrase into the homepage somewhere. Also include it in the anchor text of a link from either the homepage or a secondary (one click off home) page. On the page that you link to make sure you include the phrase in at least one paragraph and use a close variation of the phrase in a couple of paragraphs.
Add more pages of unique content to the site.
Get a few backlinks with the phrase used as the anchor text. Link some to the homepage, but even more to the targeted phrase page. The deep links are important to have.
For the phrase you’re currently ranked at #40 in Google, not ranked in MSN and #75 in Yahoo. You have 106 pages indexed by Google. The competition has 108, 680, 15300, 854, 57, 89, 173, 53, 11, and 114 pages indexed by Google. If your pages are of OK content you have enough to rank. I suspect your internal linking scheme isn't helping your site rank.
Your site is exactly the kind of site searchers probably want when they search for the phrase - you just have to help the search engines understand what your site is about. You need more pages that talk about golf, golf needs, clubs, tips, tricks, grass... anything that relates to golf where you can insert your targeted keyword phrases. For example, this page - lakevalleygolf.com/restaurant.htm - while providing useful information to your visitors - does very little to boost your site traffic. You need to flesh out the page and add targeted phrases such as "the restaurant is located within the golf course" and "play 9 rounds of golf on the Lake of the Ozarks and then enjoy a breakfast buffet". Now, the page starts to become more about a restaurant on a golf course at the Lake of the Ozarks then just about an ordinary restaurant that has little to do with the overall site. This is just one small example of many you can do throughout the site.
Since you're using images in place of text links for navigation try to alter the ALT tags to reflect your target audience. Instead of alt="Information about our Greenside restaurant" try alt="Lake Valley Golf Greenside Restaurant" . It's not a big difference, but it's going to be the aggregation of all the little things that will boost your site.
Now, the toughest part (for most webmasters) seems to be backlinks. IMO, backlinks are the most important aspect of your sites traffic. The top 10 for the phrase has links from 100 to 3400 separate domains. The average seems to be in the 400 range. Your site has links from 82 different domains. You need more, but more importantly you need more from pages that relate to your industry (golf). The site doesn't have to be a golf site, but it's much better if the page the backlink is on is about golf.
Anyhow, this is my $0.02 overview. You should be able to dramatically increase traffic by following the above advice.
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dennis
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RE: any way to see site stats for site you don't own? - 1/16/2006 16:12:25
Wow, Mojo. Your response goes beyond appreciated! Thanks so much for taking the time to review the site and make these suggestions/observations. I've learned bunches just by reading your response. I've also printed it to use as a checklist.
In your opinion - would a lot be gained by switching from the image links to text links, or would updating the Alt tags accomplish similar results?
Can you give a guy some insight as to how you determined our Google ranking, # of backlinks, etc.?
Thanks again!
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Mojo
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RE: any way to see site stats for site you don't own? - 1/16/2006 17:04:40
quote:
In your opinion - would a lot be gained by switching from the image links to text links, or would updating the Alt tags accomplish similar results?
I would try switching the ALT tags.
Seriously, before I did anything I would set up a program to track conversions. Otherwise, you're just shooting in the dark. Just driving more traffic is not a big deal if the traffic isn't targeted. It would be nice to rank #1 for 'Golf courses in Missouri', but ranking #3 for 'Lake of the Ozarks Golf' would likely drive better targeted traffic. Which means more money.
If I asked you what are the top 10 most profitable terms for your site could you tell me with 100% certainty? If not, you need better conversion tracking.
I once took a contract with a company where the contract was based mostly upon how well I ranked their site for a list of terms. Shortly after working for them I pointed out that the terms they were paying me the most for had a very low conversion rate and the best performing keywords for their site were not even in the contract. Basically, they hired me to increase their search engine visibility for phrases that they *thought* were good, but they selected the wrong phrases. This is basic web marketing, but few seem to do it.
Sometimes, how we think about our site or services is not how our customers think about us.
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J-man
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RE: any way to see site stats for site you don't own? - 1/17/2006 12:31:28
for seeihng visitors stats, Have you tried typing /stats afer the root domain, like
http://www.site.com/stats
You would not believe how many sites have this feature, one of my sites has 3 major competition, and 2 of which, if i type stats after the domain name gives me their stats - its unprotected
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dennis
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RE: any way to see site stats for site you don't own? - 1/19/2006 14:16:37
Hey J-man - very good idea. Tried it for the desired site and it came back as unavailable. Out of curiosity I tried it on my own site and came up with the user ID and PW screen. Something to certainly keep in mind though. Thanks
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spitfire
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RE: any way to see site stats for site you don't own? - 1/20/2006 7:07:52
Going back to your original question, have you tried the SearchStatus Firefox Extension?
From the developer's site
quote:
SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for users of both Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox, designed for the highly specialised needs of search engine marketers. The toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.
For every site you visit using Firefox or Mozilla, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN - all in one place. This combined search-related information means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa), so providing a balanced view of site efficacy.
The SearchStatus Mozilla/Mozilla Firefox extension appears unobtrusively at the bottom of the browser on the status bar. If you choose to view backward links for a particular page, they open in new tabs in the same browser window. Disable the automatic Google and Alexa queries and they fold away from view.
As with all things stats related, you need to know how to interpret the results. Maybe keep the tool away from "The Management" for a while. At least until you have tried out some of the search engine optimisation ideas above and can convince yourself which ideas have which effects on your own site. That could make you (and them with your assistance) better judges of what the statistics mean on other sites.
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dennis
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RE: any way to see site stats for site you don't own? - 1/20/2006 8:34:24
Thanks Spitfire. I'm not a Mozilla user, but maybe this justifies giving it a try.
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dennis
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RE: any way to see site stats for site you don't own? - 1/26/2006 16:09:58
Mostly for Mojo........
Thought I'd post a follow up here since you were so kind to provide detailed guidance. Last week the board decided to let me continue with our site and apply the same support to me that they were prepared to give someone else. Since then we've been reviewing the site, updating text, adding some features (email capture forms) and I've done a fair amount of work on alt tags, mostly on the primary few pages of the site so far. The result is that we have jumped from #40 to #16 on the Google search you sampled, and have improved on the others as well. I expect our improvement to continue as I work on more backlinks and continuing reviewing alt tags and text throughout the site. Thanks again for all your help.
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Mojo
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RE: any way to see site stats for site you don't own? - 1/26/2006 16:40:13
Your welcome and - congratulations! Remember to add good content, but mostly get those quality backlinks.
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