There are too many tools available to webmasters–too many. It is possible to slice and dice website traffic until you drive yourself nuts. That’s personal experience speaking.
Google Analytics has just added the ability to compare website traffic year-to-year. Not a good comparison for me and it looks like my troubles all stem from the hack this website took in January.
Hits to my home page are up by 4%. Yahoo and MSN send significantly more traffic than ever before. My problem is with Google–the big dog of search. My traffic from Google has been cut in half!
Search engine traffic usually ends up on the inside pages… the older pages of the blog. There are thousands of those.
What makes me sad (because as Helaine notes I primarily write for myself and view this blog as a journal or diary) is that I’ve done everything I could think of to optimize the site for search. It’s done nothing. There’s little I can do to change things.