These are notes on website design for use in organisations. It is available free for non-commercial use.

Most web authors make the mistake of thinking that original work will attract the most readers. But if you use words and phrases that the expected audience don't use, they are unlikely to find your web page with a search and unlikely to understand it if they do find the page. Most users find web pages using a web search engine, looking for one or two words. If those words are not in your web page, spelt the same way as the users expects, your web page will never be found.

You can use web searches and other tools to look at the words typically used in web pages. Many web hosting services provide statistics of the words people used to find your site. But keep in mind the people who did not fond the site. Web marketing companies collect statistics from web searchers across many sites and users.

Gavin Dispain, Web site manager, Department of the Environment and Water Resources, carried out an extensive analysis of Australian Government web sites in 2006. The results showed up problems with the markup of some web sites, also misspelling of words including "Australia". One third of traffic to Government web sites came from search engines.

Google Analytics is an example of a class of tools used for detailed analysis of web site visitors. Unlike logfile analyzer tools, such as the free open source AWStats, these tools allow the tracking of web marketing campaigns and finer grain analysis of user behavior.

Web designers need to keep in mind that many web users are directed to their site from web search engines. For April;/May 2007, Google Analytics reported that 81% of traffic to Tomw Communications was from search engines, 13% from other sites and 7% from direct traffic (people typing in web addresses).

Google Analytics will provide maps of the location of web users down to suburb or town level. An example is shown at the country level for some Tomw Communications pages.

Google Analytics will identify the sections of a web site showing the most activity. An example is shown for some Tomw Communications pages showing transport technology and environmental technology for the home most popular.

Logfile analyzers, such as AWStats can produce a report of the keywords and key phrases used to find the web site. The example shows the top ten keyphrases for the Tomw Communications web site.