Daegu has emerged to be the most trafficked page for us, other than the mainpage. We actually have a shitty ranking on Google for the keyword ‘Daegu’. I see that we are ranked #24, based on most Google Datacenters. But we do well in our long tail keywords, which are naturally more easier to move up in rank. If there is any reason not to fret too much is that ‘Daegu’ on its own, doesn’t get searched all that often. Last time that I checked Wordtracker, the keyword was only being searched 17 times a day. And depending on how you interpret site stats, we seem to be doing alright without top ranking on the cities main ‘keyword’.
Now, I don’t want to bore with explaining the pros and cons of this tracking tool vs the next. But no tracking tool shows the same results. And some are widely differently from each other. It’s like if you have 5 people watching a mystery drama that ends in a cliffhanger, each one will have different takes on whats going on and what info is left for the imagination to decide. Well, site tracking tools are not that scattered, but pretty close.
Tag-based tools like Google Analytics allow you to add html tags to all of your pages. This helps them provide detailed traffic analysis and how users navigate around. But its not without its drawbacks. Google Analytics (GA) code on the pages requires users to have Javascript installed, in order to be tracked by it. If you don’t have it, you won’t be counted. But the number of people who don’t have Javascript installed these days is not much. And then there are those who prefer to surf with Javascript disabled. And there there are other hitches that add up. If the user visiting your site is using a browser that doesn’t have cookies enabled, GA will still technically work, but the stats will be less accurate. Awstats and Webalizer are log-based and track EVERYTHING that hits your page, although Awstats filters out bots and spiders. Webalizer makes note of the referrer URL where you can see the footprints of the spiders, but you’ll have to manually subtract from the totals.
I haven’t tried Webtrends yet, which appears to use both tag-based and log-based means to measure your traffic. But the free stuff (Google Analytics, Awstats, and Webalizer) all need to be used in conjunction to get a ballpark verdict. The truth is usually somewhere in the middle of GA and Awstats. But as GA stat are more prettier to export, here’s a screenshot of the traffic that ends up on our Daegu page.
The green line shows where are traffic was last year and the blue one is traffic at this time. So we seem to averaging around 50 unique pageviews a day on the Daegu page (Webalizer minus spiders/bots says that we get 200+ pageviews to the Daegu page). So the 17 that we are not scooping from a high rank on ‘Daegu’ for Google searches doesn’t seem too terrible. This also doesn’t reflect our long tail keyword stats for Daegu pages that are off of the main one, such as Daegu nightlife (#3 on Google) and Restaurants in Daegu (#1 on Google), despite them not getting daily searches, but moreso weekly and monthly searches.
The Daegu wiki surely needs to be optimized more for SEO. But its nice to begin to see word-of-mouth disemminate, as I’ve met people offline in the city, who use it. And we had a some recent wiki edits and page additions from people in Daegu, as well, which is nice, as I’m in Seoul now and am out of touch with life down there.
