Tracking keywords visitors use to find your site?

smallville · Joined: 20 Mar 2008 Posts: 11

Is there a tool that exists that will tell you the keywords that visitors are using to find your site from search engines?

Thanks in advance...

Jim Hutchinson · Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2008 1:20 pm Post subject:

cPanel has that built into the website reports. One of them is called Webalizer.

Another site you can use is http://www.keywordspy.com
Put the domain name in the search box and it will show you the top keywords for that site.

Jim Hutchinson

smallville · Joined: 20 Mar 2008 Posts: 11

Jim:

1. Thanks for the fast response.

2. Thanks for reminding me that cpanel had this feature built in! I hadn't used it yet, but I remembered it the other day, got sidetracked, and forgot again... until you reminded me.

However, unless I'm not accessing it correctly, cpanel webalizer seems a bit limited, relative to the other resource you mentioned.

3. Wow... thanks for turning me on to keywordspy. I found out that my site is at #1 in google for a keyword I'm not taking advantage of AT ALL on my site. Who knew?

Cpanel showed it as a top search term for my site, but it doesn't give me any search engine rankings.

Thanks again!

smallville · Joined: 20 Mar 2008 Posts: 11

One thing I forgot to mention that struck me as totally bizarre...

According to cpanel one of the top "referrers" to my site, mixed in with my own site links, and above all the search engines, is another site in the same business, in another state!

I looked at their "referring" page and they don't appear to have links to my site. I even did a view source to search for my site name, to see if there was something I was missing. Nothing found. Question

I'm scared to call them to find out how (or why) they are referring people to my site for fear of losing the traffic Smile

Has anyone ever heard of anything like that?

Jim Hutchinson · Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2008 2:28 pm Post subject:

I see that in my own logs sometimes and have followed a few. Like you I did not see any links on their sites to mine. Webalizer strips most of the link after the ? and that could be where the links are coming from.

Say they had a link programmed in such as, mysite.com/?yoursite.com That would invoke a redirect to your site. The web stats strip off the ?yoursite.com so you would never know how they got to your site.

Hope that makes sense.

And yes I know that Webalizer does not give search engine rankings. That function is probably not built in because you can get that info elsewhere.

Jim