There are plenty of resources you can use in your SEO, many of them provided by your own website. Before you can use these resources though, you need to know what they are and how to use them. One of the most frequently neglected resources is a site’s server logs.Server logs, which record the activity between your site and those accessing it, contain a wealth of information for SEO. By analysing your server activity, you can see what pages are being accessed, how often, how successfully, and whether there are any gaps.
Are you wasting your crawls?
Search engine activity is a good thing to examine in your server logs. Search engine spiders don’t always crawl where you want them to. Server logs show where the spiders are spending their time. If your landing pages aren’t being seen by search engine spiders, your SEO work is being wasted.
In your analysis, look for spider traps and strange diversions. A note of caution – one thing to be wary of is whether the activity you’re seeing is actually a search engine. The Googlebot user agent can muddy the results, so always double check the IP address.
Get some experts on board
The immense amount of data involved means server logs need to be processed through a data analysis programme. It’s a good idea to get your SEO services company on board for server log analysis.
Server logs are a valuable SEO resource. If your search engine optimisation company isn’t already using them, they should be. Talk to us at Searchengineoptimisation.co.uk.