One Hit Wonders: How To Manage Your Search Engine Traffic

by Tim Slavin

This website was recently relaunched in part to make all 600 plus pages searchable by the Google search engine. If you do not know, Google will not crawl and index pages that have id= in their URL, for example, www.bozotheclown.com/ index.asp?id=rednose&action=bonk would never be indexed. The original software I used to maintain this website generated URLs with id= and so Google only crawled the first five or ten pages of this website.

Even worse, regardless of what technology used on this website, content is added so frequently that Google sends people to the home page of this site even though the content disappeared from that page long ago. This article describes the different solutions I've found work to manage traffic from Google and other search engines.

Let's start with what I call "one hit wonders," the visits that show up in your website activity files as 1 page viewed for 0 seconds with no follow on pages viewed. It's as if the visitor arrived then clicked away screaming. You might take this behavior to be a personal insult.

First, these brief visits are not bad. In my case, many of them are regular site visitors who keep up with the site using my RSS feed. They see something of interest, click a link to a page on my site, then quickly click a link on that page that leads them to the content they want. Those one hit wonders I count a huge success. It's also true that you cannot guess what a site visitor wants when they click on your link in the list of search results. In the case of this website, I suspect it is the name of the site (ReachCustomersOnline.com) that intrigues many people. They see what the site is about then quickly go back to what they really needed to do, an activity that had little to do with this site.

There are, however, some number of visitors who will arrive at your website in search of something you can provide but the visitor never sees how your site can help them. How can you help the one page visitors who could benefit from your site?

For this website, I find that using SiteMeter.com helps immensely. I can view site visits in near real time by referral and quickly see not only how many one hit wonders are visits are from search engines and how many through my RSS feed (their referrals show up as "Unknown" and I get an email, more on that later). The search engine referrals list at SiteMeter includes a pre-populated link that leads me to the search engine used, the query used, and the results displayed to my visitors.

I focus on the search engine referrals at Sitemeter, click each link to see the search results page that caused my visitor to click to my site, find my listing in the search results, then check to see if the search results point to my home page or to a page buried within my site. The latter is ideal because those are archived pages and the visitor will always find content at that location.

With the old version of this website, most of the search engine results pointed to the home page. So with my new website, I coded in PHP a redirect script that grabbed the search terms used to find my site and fed the terms into my search engine page. Instead of being dumped at the home page and left to fend for themselves, they were dropped off at my search results page already populated with results that matched the query they used with the search engine that brought them to the site. I wrote the search redirect script to handle live search requests that appeared on my SiteMeter pages.

Like me, you might think this is a brilliant solution. Not to mention very helpful, even thoughtful. You would be wrong, of course.

I discovered to my horror that Google quickly ran through the 600 plus pages on my website and the indexed results showed up within an hour. When I clicked on the referral links at SiteMeter, I found that Google and other search engines now pointed to archived pages, not the home page. Instead of helping people, my search redirect script kept them from the content they wanted. I panicked. I had to scramble to do something.

Then the solution hit me: the problem was the small number of search results that led visitors to my home page. So I tweaked my search redirect script and made it work only on the home page. When someone arrives at the home page from a search engine, they now see big text with a link that offers to let them search my site using the terms they used to arrive at my site. They don't have to remember their search terms. They don't have to find and type into my search box.

In addition to the search redirect script, I also track usage of my RSS feed. If you do not know, RSS is simply a way to output headlines and some amount of descriptive text that an RSS reader (more software!) can retrieve and read. By using RSS, visitors can scan content from many sites without having to sort through email newsletters (and endless spam) and visiting websites.

I find that adapting the code that generates my RSS feed so that the link includes the title of the article allows me to track what articles interest these visitors most and, by extension, how many of them visit the site through my RSS feed. This approach also strikes a nice balance between useful data and data that might invade their privacy (although, to be honest, it is near impossible to attach a name and location to an IP address, the only location information available in your website activity files.)

The script below is the one I use to email myself whenever someone clicks a link in the RSS feed; you'll need to figure out how to modify the code that generates your RSS feed to add the string ?t=title to each of your links (where title is dynamically generated). I found that task to be easy with pMachine and MoveableType. I simply found the variable used to print the title in the RSS feed and added ?t= plus the variable after the variable used to generate the link. The script then searches for t= anytime someone requests a page from the website and, when t= is found, it sends me an email with the title, date, time, and URL.

Bottomline, not all one page zero second visits to your site are a disaster. You can (and should) do things to help the visitors who want content from you and cannot find it. My experience is that tracking usage of my RSS feed (so that I can determine how much of that traffic contributes to my one page visits) and placing a search engine redirect link on my home page is the most I can do. It is more than nothing but less than the impossible task of mind reading what visitors want from my website.

Our credits to the source/author of this article: Author: Tim Slavin Tim Slavin is the Publisher of ReachCustomersOnline.com, an online magazine that offers free how-to internet knowledge for budget-minded businesses and the designers, programmers, and others who support them. Tim and his wife run Red Horse Communications, a writing and internet consultancy. Online since 1988, Tim has done websites, email marketing, SEO, programming, and other internet projects since 1995. This article is taken from the ReachCustomersOnline.com website. Further reprinting prohibited

Source: http://www.reachcustomersonline.com