Selecting Keyword Phrases to Monitor

Concentrate on the Important

Pareto's Principle can be applied to your site visitors. The 80-20 rule indicates that 80% of your traffic comes from 20% of the keyword phrases that relate to your site.

This allows you to concentrate your efforts in areas with a big payback.

In other words: You should not spend an equal amount of time trying to optimize your site for keyword phrases that are not going to produce results.

Every website maintains a log of activity. Retrievals of every page, even every image, are tracked. You can examine this log file to extract statistics about your site. Or you can use a log analyzer that provides a summary of the log file.

One log analyzer that is available on almost all websites is Webalizer. This product produces a comprehensive list of keyword phrases that people entered into the search engines to arrive at your site.

Part of its output is a display of the keyword phrases people used at a search engine to actually arrive at your site. Here is a display for Cheap Long Distance http://www.cheap-long-distance.us

AwStats is another log analyzer found on many sites. I prefer to view its output. Here is AwStats' display for Cheap Long Distance http://www.cheap-long-distance.us

These are the important keywords you can monitor. But, should you monitor them all?

The point of monitoring your position in Google it to see the results of your search engine optimization efforts. You probably will not spend much time optimizing your site for most keyword phrases.

You should, therefore, monitor only those keyword phrases for which you will spend time optimizing your pages.

Picking those phrases that you will actually try to improve will be effective in showing your progress. It also helps show you when you do something wrong and should replace the changes you made with a backup copy of your page.

This selection process will help you target your activities and keep you from spending useless time on efforts that will produce only trivial improvements in your results.

Sign up for our series of tips and tools you can use right now to successfully start making money on the Internet.