One part of SEO that many people have trouble with, even professionals – is data-mining.  I wrote a Google Knol titled : Website Analytic Tips for SEO a few months back and received good feedback on it.

The truth is, that data-mining can be very time consuming and a bit boring but it is essential! There is so much great information hidden among your website statistics that you are really missing out on good opportunities if you don’t leverage this data.   Here is an example of an opportunity I recently discovered:

March 7, 2010 – April 6, 2010 Google sent 13,4xx non-paid visits via 2,8xx keywords
March 7, 2009 – April 6, 2009 Google sent 10,8xx non-paid visits via 2,2xx keywords

23.xx% increase in visits

http://www.xxxxxxxxxxxx.com/xxxxxxx.htm – Pageviews 97x Previous: 9x (+914.xx%)

xxx xxxxx xxxxxx – rank 5th in Google.ca

March 7, 2010 – April 6, 2010 67 visits
March 7, 2009 – April 6, 2009 0 visits

xxxxxxxxx – rank number 2 in Google.ca

March 7, 2010 – April 6, 2010 54 visits
March 7, 2009 – April 6, 2009 0 visits

Almost all the visitors are finding this page by searching two keywords, so optimizing further for those should increase our ranking and traffic to this page.

Through data-mining we find opportunities like this and the goal here is to follow the natural trend of this page garnering more visitors, so I will build some backlinks and authority directly to the page to increase its traffic. I might also tweak the on-page content to help with relevance and to make sure I get conversions.

Generally speaking I have gradually changed many inner page title tags so they are more unique and contain appropriate keywords to match the content of those pages. In the long-term this should increase the long-tail traffic to inner pages and offer us more opportunities like this to rank and receive high quality visitors to these pages.