webalizer Archives - K6HR SDR Server 2024

It seemed like I wasn’t getting anywhere with the first SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plugin I installed. Today I installed Yoast SEO and I could immediately see what was lacking in my SEO configuration. You could say I had an SEO Breakthrough!

Homebrew SEO

Yoast is light years ahead of their competition. I found their user interface genuinely intuitive. Interpretation of the Yoast interface guided me to making the following improvements:

Added ‘tags’ to all posts
Added ‘focus keywords’ to all posts and pages
Fine tuned content for improved SEO ratings
Search Result ‘Appearance’ settings
Keyword Research

I spent approximately 3 hours inputting all the new SEO data. It was not difficult, just time consuming, since all my pages and posts required the updates. Of course, now that I know what each post and page requires in order to meet Yoast SEO standards, I will include that SEO data as I create new content. e.g. this post.

There has been significant progress made in driving traffic to the site. Before I installed WordPress my legacy website averaged 400 visits per month.

Since installing WordPress (and the limited SEO plugin I just replaced) on 12/10/17, web traffic has increased from the average 400 visits to (whats tracking to be) 4000 visits this month. Here is my AWStats data for the past 12 months. Go ahead and click, you can look through them if you like.

I’m finding Bing to be far more responsive than Google. I noticed that some subtle changes in “appearance” I had made, showed up quickly in Bing results, while not showing up at all on Google. Also the Google Search Console is virtually empty, while the Bing console is reporting everything. I’ve entered my “Google Verification Code” into Yoast, and I’m hoping this helps improve the results with Google. I’m certain both services crawls are allowed. Bing seems to be the “first to the party”.

The Bing Webmaster “Diagnostics and Tools” section includes a “Keyword Research” function. I used this tool to determine the most used search terms (keywords) as they relate to amateur radio, and more specifically, my website.

I’m hoping it will improve search results now that I’ve incorporated all the top rated keywords I found, into my content. I have no idea if this will improve placement in search results. However, it should cause my site to appear in search results it would not have appeared in prior to today’s enhancements.

It will certainly be interesting to see what affect, if any, the changes made today have on traffic and search results.

Back To The Front

Migrating Apache2 Log Files

I got my second wind after successfully migrating the WordPress website and got to thinking about moving all the log files. I plan to keep all the stats I accumulated under the old domain and continue forward.

After several failed attempts at migrating Webalizer I gave up and decided to look for a more up to date log analyzer. I quickly found out my first choice, the “GoAccess” log analyzer, would not work for my purposes, so I started looking for something else and came across “AWStats”.

Moving On From Webalizer

Webalizer is like a trusted old friend. Webalizer has been running here for so long, I wondered how I’d ever get along without it. One look at AWStats and I was ready to switch. It makes Webalizer look like something from the Flintstones!

AWStats

I was successful in transferring the log files from the old domain to the new domain. I was able to work it out after reading this article and combining it with ideas presented in a second article.

Steps taken:

Delete all existing files in the AWStats DataDir ‘/var/lib/awstats’

Combine all my log files using the utility “logresolvemerge.pl” into one ‘masterlog’ file.

Temporarily modify awstats.conf to update from the ‘masterlog’ file.

Run the update.

Voila! The previous years logs were successfully imported into AWStats!

Next, I went back to the ‘awstats.conf’ file and set it to back to read the daily Apache2 access.log file

Log File / Domain Overlap

The Apache server is still running on the old domain. I can see there are still some connections to it, so I put a redirect on the entry page, and another redirect on my other high traffic page.

Using redirects, we can ensure all clients using outdated bookmarks will be taken to the same page on the new server.

After this, the only connections I should see should be direct connections to old domain URL’s from stale bookmarks.

I plan to let the Apache servers overlap in operation for the remainder of the month of December (2018 for that matter). On January 1, 2019 I will take the old Apache server offline for good. By that time all the search engines should have my entire site indexed, and I hope to have AWStats completely tweaked out by then.