Question about search engines 1

[naiku]

I have just been looking at the log for visitors to my website, and on the languages page it tells me I have had visits from people with the following languages:

English (United Kingdom) - No problems, I am in the UK
English (United States) - No problems, people I know in the US have looked and when installing Windows English (United States) is the default language, some people may not have changed it.
English (Australia) - How are people finding my site?
English (Caribbean) - See Above
English - No problems, I am guessing this must be from an older version of Windows/IE or Netscape.
English (New Zealand) - See (Australia)

Basically nothing bothers me with the above, I was just curious if anyone could explain why people from the above countries have found my website, I only submitted to English search engines (.co.uk extensions) and the website is not advertised/listed anywhere that I know of.

Is it possible that my site has just come up on some random searches made and people came across it purely by chance? You know I just realised that I am thinking too much, just curious I guess as to how people are finding my website. When I do a search I can never find it!

Naiku

 

[Wullie]

Hi mate,

A lot of foreign engines also scour the English sites because English is so widely spoken around the world.

Does your logs not give the actual referrer page of the engine with the search term? If so then just open that page and you will see your listing there.

Hope this helps Wullie

sales@freshlookdesign.co.uk

http://www.freshlookdesign.co.uk

http://www.searchit-now.co.uk

 

[Wullie]

Another point to note is that some people in the UK may originally be here from abroad. These users could have the foreign settings on their browser.

Hope this helps Wullie

sales@freshlookdesign.co.uk

http://www.freshlookdesign.co.uk

http://www.searchit-now.co.uk

 

[naiku]

My log does not have the referring page, can you recommend any good ones I can use which do display that to me?

At the moment I am using the Counter Active script which can be found here

http://www.hologramdesigns.com/devil/scripts/perl/001/

Naiku

 

[Wullie]

Hi mate,

Check out

http://www.xav.com/scripts/axs/

Hope this helps Wullie

sales@freshlookdesign.co.uk

http://www.freshlookdesign.co.uk

http://www.searchit-now.co.uk

 

[naiku]

Excellent thanks, looks pretty good will have to try that out either over the weekend or on Monday, probably Monday since I already have other things to do this weekend.

Take it easy

Naiku

 

[marcbrown]

Hi, naiku

Interesting subject...

I have asked people the same question because they found my personal websites which are/were hosted on other domains.

1) They found them because they searched for them. Sorry to sound sarcastic-but the only responses I got from people who who found my websites all boiled down to this fact.

2) Since I haven't seen your website I can only guess it's due to the meta tags-but I remember reading a good article about search engines on

http://www.webmonkey.com

3) If you don't mind getting carried away- find out the differences between various search engines. I once used this to my advantage when trying to gat my placement higher
on the search engines. I wish I could remember where I found the info so I could tell you, but it seems somehow all the jocking for position made little sense

 

[naiku]

It is definately an interesting subject, I will have to check out some new scripts to that I can find out how people are being referred to my website.

At least I am not bothered by the traffic coming from all over the world, maybe if I get enough interest from Australia my boss will pay for me to go over there! and I guess with website traffic "the more the merrier"

Thanks for the info guys

Naiku

 

[naiku]

Ok I have downloaded and setup the new log from

http://www.xav.com,

not sure if you are using it Wullie but I have a problem setting the username and password on the admin page. I have set them up in the ax-admin.pl file but when I go to the page it just opens instantly, no request for a username/password, any ideas on that one?

Other than that all I need to do now is get some traffic flowing through the site since I am back to 0 hits again!

 

[naiku]

Weird, I rebooted my PC and now the script is asking me for a username and password so its all working as expected.

Now to find a way to generate some traffic!

Naiku

 

[cian]

Hi naiku,

Did you forget to logout first times?? XAV sets cookies on your system so if you dont logout then you won't need to login!

On XAV check out the visitor flow, it will show you some of the keywords used to find your site, etc

About the search engines, I presume simple international users also use these search engines or perhaps partners of said search engines?



É

http://www.endamcg.com/finland-gaa

 

[naiku]

Not sure about the logging in/out problem I tried on a seperate PC and did not get the password prompt either, well it works now so nothing to worry about there.

Can't check the visitor flow yet, I have had no visitors! hopefully a few people will go looking for it today and I can get a better idea of how people are finding the site and if I need to change the keywords etc.

 

[Wullie]

Hi mate,

Just a few things to note:

1) The terms used to find you within a short time will not accuratly tell you the overall phrases that are going to be used and whether you are targeting the correct ones or not.

2) Changing your keywords will likely not make the slightest difference to the results that are returned in the major engines. Most engines do not use Meta Keywords now and therefor a lot of other factors come into play such as link popularity and the actual quality of the page content.

Hope this helps Wullie

sales@freshlookdesign.co.uk

http://www.freshlookdesign.co.uk

http://www.searchit-now.co.uk

 

[naiku]

Hopefully I have some quality content on my site Gotta sit back and wait now really. Not much else I can do, maybe I should run an experiment on how easily people can find the site just to get some sort of idea of how easy/difficult it is to locate.

Could produce some interesting results!

 

[MarcLodge]

Naiku,
Give us a clue as to what the sites about and we'll see if we can find it!
Marc

 

[naiku]

Ok its an air conditioning company based in Winchester, Hampshire in the UK.

Not sure what else to use for clues, I guess words such as cooling, heating, air etc.

Should be interesting to see what happens, I found it at number 3 on an altavista search earlier today But most searches I try seem to list business directories first.

Naiku