However, if you are publishing content on external sites that link to you, visitors from these sites may be more valuable than those from search engines, since they already know about your products or services, maybe have read something that you've written, and are more ready to do business with you.

Comparing Short / Long Visits

Looking at amount of time spent on your site can give clues as to how well it's meeting visitor expectations and engaging their interest.

Use ClickTracks "Create Labels" tool, and select "had a certain session length" combined with "at most 5 seconds" as your criteria to track people who left your site almost immediately. Then, create another label using same criteria, but select "at least 60 seconds" (or your preference) to identify all visitors who spent some significant time on your site.

Now you can investigate:

Which are your best performing keywords and referrers:

* Which keywords and referring sites result in long visits?

* Which result in short visits?

If you have a lot of traffic from certain keywords, but these result in very short visit lengths, check landing pages for those searches (see Part 3 of this series for more on this topic). It may be that first page that visitors see is not meeting their expectations, and should be modified.

If you have keywords that are very successful in generating visitors who stay on your site, check that you've optimized them for as many search engines as possible.

Which pages do people who stay on your site (long visits) see:

* Which pages engage your visitors most? (check time spent on page from Navigation report). Then ensure that you have appropriate calls to action on these pages to drive your traffic to next step, so that visitors are not leaving from these points.

* Are these pages attracting enough traffic?

If you have pages which are clearly successful once you've got visitors to them, are there ways to increase number of people who see them? Is navigation to these pages sufficiently attractive from other parts of your site? Should they be better positioned?

For help in using ClickTracks to evaluate your "must-see" pages, see Part 3 of this series.

Part 3: Evaluating Critical Pages

Landing Pages

It's important to know exact pages of your site that various search engines link to for each of your major keywords and phrases. These are called "landing pages", and are first pages that visitors see when they click on search results.

Landing pages are critical for initial impressions and credibility, especially for people who are not familiar with your business. It's also important to ensure that these pages fulfill visitors' expectations based on their search terms.

Use ClickTracks "Create Labels" tool, and select "used a certain search engine query" combined with keyword or phrase as your criteria to track people who came to your site with that search.

Now you can investigate:

What are Top Entry Pages (i.e. "Landing Pages") for this search term:

* Is search term included in page content? Often, visitors will be looking for their keywords to confirm that they're in right place. If your page doesn't seem relevant to them, they'll leave.

Combine landing page information with Top Exit Pages or Short Visits for this term for clues as to whether your landing page is sufficiently engaging.

Does Landing Page drive visitors into rest of your site:

* If you do have relevant content on page, but visitors still leave, could there be other reasons for their lack of engagement?

Landing pages are also those that you link to in your e-mail marketing messages - and again, are first thing that reader sees when they click through from one of your campaigns.

Often, site owners assume that every visitor sees their home page, which is primary means of navigation. Your landing pages are first that visitors will see, so they need to act as mini-home pages too.

Use this information about what visitors are seeking when they arrive at your site and what their expectations may be to direct them to other pages that will meet their needs.

Goal or "Must-See" Pages

The key pages on your site where people make decisions to buy a product, download a sample, subscribe to your newsletter, etc are known as "goal" or "must-see" pages. These are places to which you drive your traffic to in order to achieve your site objectives.

Use ClickTracks "Create Labels" tool, and select "visited a certain page" combined with your goal page name as your criteria to track people who visited that page.

Now you can investigate:

Is this page hard to find?

* Do visitors take a long time to reach this page? (check average time to page from Navigation report)

* Are there other "must-see" pages that are critical on path to this page? (check "Previous Page" information in Navigation report)

These findings can give you ideas for improving navigation to, and positioning of your "Goal Page".

Does how visitor found your site affect success of "Goal Page"?

* Are there critical keyword searches or referring URL's that generate better traffic in reaching your goal?

Combine this information with your most effective keywords data to ensure that you're paying for best return on investment in generating quality traffic.

(c) Philippa Gamse. All rights reserved.

6) We keep taking out keywords:

website content, copywriting, ghostwriting, copywriter, ghostwriter, advertising copy

Result -> Page 3 all web Alta Vista, Hotbot, Lycos and Yahoo

7) Omitting 'ghostwriter' is death blow, in end. This string of words delivers a no ranking in any of search engines' top three pages:

website content, copywriting, ghostwriting, copywriter

Result -> no pr.

8) Adding ghostwriter again:

website content, copywriting, ghostwriting, ghostwriter

Result -> a page three listing on AltaVista.

9) But when we take out ghostwriter and ghostwriting and leave in most of our keywords, we are still very much loved by hotbot and Lycos Pro,

clicks, writing, website content, copywriting, copywriter, advertising copy

Result -> Page 3 ranking Hotbot and Lycos.

10) Let's put them on a weightloss diet. Not a good idea:

website content, copywriting, copywriter, advertising copy

Result -> no pr

11) So what happens if we enter two hottest keywords just by themselves? Ghostwriter and ghostwriting

Result->no pr.

We can't expect people looking for us to be typing in more than two, at most three keywords. Adding one simple word to combination does not alter anything. Website, ghostwriting, ghostwriter yields zero results.

But exchanging website for website content lands us pages 3 again in HotBot and Lycos.

Content copywriter, ghostwriter, also zero returns. And Content writing, copywriting, ghost writing is also not giving us a PR.

So here we go, we now have some idea of where future web traffic and web clients are going to come from. Or at least so we think. Now what can we realistically expect from our wonderful page ranks? We are a copywriting business and ideally want to be seen by advertising agencies that outsource writing to small freelance guys like us. So let´s hunt those down.

They are competition. Let's analyse them some more. It turns out soon that we need to do better to maintain levels of euphoria that are filling office to brim. Marketleap shows us people in advertising with as many links as we have and that are also grouped in category advertising and marketing. Too bad, our nearest competitor is a site named www.trendcreators.com, which does marketing research surveys and its link number is twice as high as ours. It's time to talk some more sense.

So we go back to keyword analysis tool at keywordtracker and this is where reality hits home and we begin to understand bigger picture some more. Running each word through analyser (and actually completing a preliminary competitive analysis in stage 4 of tool, which is easily missed out on) we begin to be even more bepuzzled.

A total of 18 of our keywords are words that are slightly in demand, one is wrong and three were never requested during last 60 days (among which our name). Of keywords that were in demand, number of competing sites offering services on basis of same words in MSN was so high that deviding demand by offer -an equasion that's widely used to determine how valuable a particular keyword actually is- yields very low numbers.

The Keyword Effectiveness Index can be calculated this way for every word that's tracked and here's a quick overview of our keywords' effectiveness in MSN search engine. A keyword term like ´editing services´, attracted queries from 35 people over last 60 days. That in itself is quite low, we think, but aside from this fact, companies that are listed under these keywords, our competition, amount to 35,124. The two numbers yield a KEI ratio of 0.206% for 'editing services, which indicates it is a search term not highly rated.

KEI ratios of below 10% are deemed not interesting competitionwise and are certainly not advisable to purchase, say advertising gurus. Anything over 10% is beginning to be interesting and when you are beginning to near top percentile, 400, you´re likely generating massive traffic numbers.

Not any of KEI ratios were above 3.5%. Lucky for us that we are in top rankings even though above gobbledegook is not really shedding any light on matter so far. What's more worrying, is that we still have got to see traffic coming. Seven guests yesterday, and that´s pretty standard since site´s inception (....why lie?)

And not being able to incorporate effect high rankings are likely to have on KEI in any measure accurately, we somewhat remain in dark about just exactly how popular we will be, DESPITE OUR HIGH RANKING. With demand for individual keywords on low side and competition overly present, our traffic numbers are most likely not going to be blowing pan out any time soon.

Quick daily scans of number of visitors with devices like www.hit-o-meter.com have confirmed this assumption so far. Even if of all 5,000 or so queries people type in using our combined keywords over two month periods, contentclix managed to attract double KEI ratio, this would still only mean traffic streams to our site of at most 30 visitors at most in a time span of 2 months.

Perhaps we´re bad losers, but we are starting to hate boyz at wordtracker!

Most search engines that offer keyword buying run similar services although it's not really 100% clear if keywords included concern queries for find free services or paid for listings.

We have yet to see what difference it makes for us to have a PR and we'd be more than happy to update you on our progress!

For time being, all we can attribute rankings to is our outstanding work. There is no other explanation, folks. Line up work!