If you spend any time reading about search engine optimization, you will find a huge amount of discussion about keywords, and the various tools such as Google's keyword analyser available to help to choose these.

There is one source of information about keywords that is far too often over-looked - your own site logs. Many website owners seem to be unaware of the fact that when a visitor finds your site through typing a search term into a search engine, this is normally recorded in the site logs. Admittedly, if you have ever tried to read your logs they can be pretty hard to understand, and you really do need to a tool to analyse them.

Many hosting companies do provide visitor statistics of some sort, which are based on analysis of the site logs. However these do not always provide sufficiently detailed information. One particularly good tool of this sort is Awstats. If your hosting company does not support it then it is worth asking them why not, because it is free. This tool can give you a complete list of all the search terms and keywords used to visit your site on a monthly basis. All Inspiration Web Design hosting accounts come with AWStats installed for you.

An alternative is to download the logs and find a tool to analyse them yourself. There are several of these available free to download on the internet. They can take a bit of work to use, but are well worth the effort, at least on an occasional basis.

If you do this you will gain a fascinating insight into the way your site is viewed by Google, also into the way that people actually search for websites. One of the things that you will immediately discover is that the search terms that people actually use are far more diverse and unpredictable than you might imagine.

Even if your website is a fairly small-scale one you are likely to find over the course of a month there may be hundreds of different search terms used to find your site. This is why I think it is a mistake to concentrate your search marketing on too narrow a range of keywords, because it ignores the complexity of actual search behaviour on the internet.

Analysing your logs can also tell you what sort of visitors you are getting. For example, if you are a commercial site and getting a lot of visitors but not many sales it may tell you why. If a lot of your visitors are looking for free downloads, for example, that will show up in the search terms that they use, and may explain why your sales are poor in spite of the number of visitors. You can then start to put this right by changing your site content.

In short, your site logs can be an invaluable marketing tool - you should get to know them.