Hello friends,

My site is not yet SEOed...but it's getting there. Anyway, I'm always looking at my web stats for my site. In there, I can see that I'm actaully getting traffic from AOL NetFind, Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. I can see the search terms people used to find me as well.

This is pretty much the same day after day.

However, when I used those same terms to try to find my site, I find nothing. I'm not there. But tomorrow, I'll see that 50 or 100 people again found me on Google using a keyword.

What gives? I expanded Googles preferences to show me 100 results per page. Not only am I visually looking for myself, but I'm also running a quick IE page search for my URL. Nothing. I go all the way to the end of the list (not just at Google - but all all the SEs). Nothing. Yet the hits still arrive.

Any ideas?

...I'll see that 50 or 100 people again found me on Google using a keyword.

My emphasis in the above. I can only guess here, but if by "a keyword" you mean one single word, then your metrics are set up in a way that's not very useful to you.

Over the years, I've seen various webhost-provided stats programs set up to return single keywords from queries used to find you... and I've never figured out why anyone might think this single keyword information is useful. If your stats are set up this way, then this is a case in point of why this data is not useful.

People generally search in phrases. The average query length these days is probably about 2.5 words. Your stats should be set up to return the phrases that searchers are using to find you, not the individual words. It also helps to know which page was returned for a particular query.

It's very unlikely, at this stage in the game, that you'll be ranking for single keywords in any event.

Thanks Robert. Acutally, same deal for phrases too. Overall, I just mean that I simply cannot find myself on the search engines after some serious looking - yet my stats constantly show traffic from them. That traffic can be broken down to show keyword sources and of course phrases, etc. that bring people in.

Could it be that people are finding you through Local Search while you are looking for yourself through the standard Google interface?

I'd download the raw log file and unzip it then open it in notepad.. do a find for google and see what you get..

Web logs are a hive of useful information.
There are a few freeware/cheap basic web log analytic tools that you could use which would point you in the right direction.

I would try sticking level 10 hit counter in. I used it on all my sites in addition to raw logs and google analytics.

It is free, they have cgi and php / mysql version ( I recommend the latter as its easier to get working).

The interface is flash and gives you LOTS of useful data. In addition, you can go to the "refferers" tab, change the option to show "search phrases from SE" and this will list all the terms people are finding you with and from which engine. The bit that may help you is that you can click on these and they will load the exact search string that was used by the client etc.

ALWAYS REMEMBER THOUGH that a visitor may have got the results from a different data center to the one you are using, that may be why you personally cant find yourself but others are.

Anyway, check out level 10, everyone should really as its a wonderful free tool. I have used it for years and I find it is often overlooked...

http://hitcounter.leveltendesign.com/

there is also a demo
http://hitcounter.leveltendesign.com/demo.html
EDIT// Seems the demo is a bit busted in some sections, easier to just install and play for yourself :)

Denemante,

Yup - probably coming from another datacenter. Might be the new test datacenter at http://64.233.179.104 - it's only up occasionally and this could explain why the listings are difficult for you to find.