Most Popular Website Entrance Pages

Knowing which pages are most popular is very helpful. But another facet of site traffic is not just which pages are viewed most, but which pages were viewed first. See not every session begins at the home page. We can see this under Navigation, by picking the Entrance page report. Now look at this, my home page is the entry page only about 10% of the time. This is an important observation, and it's typical of most sites. That's because search engines index all of my pages, and because sub-pages usually contain the richest, most focused content, it's only natural that these sub-pages would be the first pages viewed from search engine results. This means that the honor of being an Entrance page is shared quite broadly across all the pages of my site. In fact, it seems that most of my top entry pages are actually parts of my monthly newsletters. Since there are a lot of these pages and each one gets a few visits each month--this adds up to a lot of traffic!

That's why, by regularly creating compelling content--which adds more content rich sub-pages--you can experience significant growth in search traffic--but that's a different video.

There are a few pages in this list to be ignored. The robots.txt is one, and these XML pages are another. Because of the way RSS works, RSS XML pages, if you have them, will always show up high on this report. But I'm not going to go into analyzing RSS traffic in this newsletter.