Traffic analysis – does it help you create a better blog, hub or website?

I’ve had an interesting month writing for my blog. In January this year (2011) I got around 1,600 visits in total and I was determined to beat that for February. I wanted to do it through proper traffic analysis. Thanks to my efforts to blog more regularly (and to focus on strong keywords that were attracting the right kind of traffic) I managed to beat that and achieve 2,400 visits for February.

It can work for hubs too, as well as any other site or articles you might be earning money from.

Hubpages generously allows you to check out the stats for each individual hub, and when I started doing this I discovered more information than I thought I would. In fact it was almost as good as the Wordpress stats I get on my blog.

You can look at the overall total of visits to your hub, as well as which keywords have been bringing them to you in the first place. There have been several occasions where a hub has been doing reasonably well, and my traffic analysis has led to me tweaking the title or even the content to get even more traffic.

The hub metrics are pretty good too, because you can tell how long people are spending reading your hub. They tend to spend longer reading hubs that have more words, but you still need to get them onto the hub in the first place. The keyword information is useful in this respect, and I always go back to it after a while to see how a hub can get even better.

Even though you may do keyword research to begin with, before you publish a new hub or site, you are still blundering around in the dark to a certain extent. You might have a certain amount of data to use to your advantage, but until you start seeing some results – or even a lack of them – on the hub or site, you cannot do any tweaking to improve those results.

I decided to start checking the traffic analysis on my blog – particularly looking at where people were coming from and which keywords were bringing them to me – at the end of January. In just one month of conscientiously targeting keywords in my blog posts I was able to vastly increase the visits I was getting. I have seen a knock on effect in the affiliate sales and clicks I have got as well, during that same period.

One thing I have really enjoyed playing around with lately on Hubpages is the title tuner. This is a quick and easy way of improving my hubs in accordance with some keyword research, already done for me by Hubpages. It only works with hubs that have been around for a while, but it is certainly worth checking on once in a while.

Even though it is good to check on your keywords before starting a new blog post or hub, it is even better to go back and see what is working (and perhaps more importantly, what isn’t) once it has been on the net for a while. This is when you can learn even more from it – as I have now discovered.