Reading logs, search referrers, and page content

Posted by stuart as , , ,

I was just going through the logs for my “Adelaide Tropical Fish” experimental site, and noticed that I was getting a little search traffic for terms which I didn’t have on the page.

These are what’s called “broad match” search referrals. The actual term verbatim is not on the page, but all the words that make up the phrase are there in some form or another.  It can be a little harder to grab the number one spot for these terms if they aren’t actually on your page, and I was ranking generally anywhere between 5 - 20 for a few of these terms.

So what to do?

Go back, re-write the content to include the exact terms, and wait for the search engines to crawl the page again.  Then check the ranking.

This was a good reminder to me that your logs are your best friend when it comes to on page SEO.