Search Engines and Search Terms
One of Funnel Webs most immediately useful features is its ability to track and record interactions between your web site and the Internets long list of search engines, robots and other search tools.
Every true search engine employs a program called a spider (or robot) that continuously travels the Internet looking for new pages and meticulously records every word on each new page it finds. If it has visited the page before, it compares the current page to the version it archived in its database during its last visit and updates its records if any changes have been made.
Professional web site developers know that the first and most important step in attracting large amounts of traffic to a site is keyword optimization. In the "header" section of each publicly accessible web page, developers should and usually do place a series of META tags, which contain indexing instructions for visiting search engine robots.
META tags tell the robots such things as whether or not they should record the contents of the page, whether they should follow any links found in the page, what text to use as the pages description, how often the robot should return and, most importantly, the keywords that the page wishes to be indexed under.
The keywords META tag is a list of search terms and phrases which the sites developer believes will be the words typically used to find the site in a search engine. For instance, if a site is selling used cars, the developer might choose words such as car, automobile, used cars, low mileage, etc. The hope is that anyone searching for used cars through a search engine will perform a search for these words and their site will be one of the first links displayed.
However, it can be extraordinarily difficult to anticipate which terms other people are going to use to find your site. A small but prosperous industry has developed solely around helping web site owners pick the most effective keywords.
Funnel Webs Search Terms report takes all the guess work out of keyword optimization. By showing web site owners and developers exactly which terms are being used to reach the site (not merely the terms they think will be used), Funnel Web shines a clarifying spotlight on the effectiveness of the sites current keywords.
If the phrases found in Funnel Webs Search Terms report dont match those found in the sites META tags, a web developer can quickly and easily optimize the sites keywords to more accurately reflect the terms that real users are searching for.
Additionally, Funnel Webs Search Engines report reveals which search engines and directories are being used most often to find your site. This can be critically important when determining where to concentrate your link submission and advertising efforts.
When a robot visits your site and begins to index its pages, it leaves a distinct signature in your servers log file. For this reason, Funnel Webs Robots report is capable of revealing which robots visited your site most often, when they were there, how long they stayed and which pages they indexed.
By cross-referencing this information with that found in the Search Engines report, site owners can easily compare the list of robots visiting them most frequently with the search engines that are being used to actually find their site. This process clearly highlights the search engine and link submission techniques that are most effective for that specific site.
In all, Funnel Web quantifies the keywords used to find your site, the search engine robots that are visiting most often and the predominant search engines being used by your visitors.
These three pieces of information are perhaps the most important statistics for anyone interested in promoting an online presence, for they are the factors that will ultimately determine how many visitors reach your site and how successful your online endeavor will be.
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