Web Site Traffic

Web site traffic is the number one imperative of 99-percent of the marketers on the Internet. How does one go about gaining more web site traffic? That is putting the cart before the horse. The first thing a person needs to do is measure current web site traffic before embarking on gaining more traffic. The second step is to use some or all of the methods listed below to gain more web site traffic and the third step is to measure current hits once again in order to calculate the success of the traffic-building campaign.

Measuring Web Site Traffic

You may know where you want to go, but how do you get there if you don't know where you're starting from? By measuring current web site traffic, you'll establish a baseline of how many hits you're currently receiving and where they're coming from.

If someone else is hosting your site, most likely they'll have a traffic analysis package that you can access through the control panel. Packages such as Webalizer or AW Stats are common. Even if one of these web site traffic analysis applications is not offered by your host, most likely you'll still have access to the log files and can download these to a PC and use an application such as Funny Web Analyzer to give out the necessary stats.

If these web site traffic analysis packages are not available or understandable, you may wish to turn to an outside vendor who will give you a little Java code to put on the pages in order to give the necessary stats. Vendors like web-stats.com or freestats.com are a couple of places to start.

Once you have an idea of how many visitors per day you're receiving and where they're coming from it is time to start using some methods to gain web site traffic.

Gaining Web Site Traffic

The best method with the highest return on investment of gaining web site traffic is to perform search engine optimization (SEO) on a web site. Traffic from the natural search engines such as Google is free and for some online businesses, this accounts for 80-percent of their sales. Spending a couple of thousand dollars on search engine optimization may seem like a lot of money. But if your site has, say, 10 pages in the top rankings of the search engines (SE's), do you think the resulting traffic will make this money back? If the answer is no, then you may not wish to do SEO. But if the answer is yes, which is most often the case, then you'll not only recoup the investment but most likely gain thousands of dollars more in sales on your site. Isn't this what you're going for in the first place?

Since SEO is a slow, long-term plan for gaining web site traffic, typically taking months for the rankings to kick in, many web site owners choose to use a pay-per-click campaign to gain traffic in the short term. Pay-per-click programs such as Google AdWords and Yahoo / Overture Site Match are a way to see immediate results by placing a web site in the Sponsored Listings section of the SE's search results page. Traffic from these campaigns can also help you judge the viability of the keywords you've chosen for the SEO campaign. When doing pay-per-click (PPC) you basically bid on a keyword or key-phrase. The more you pay, the higher you appear in the Sponsored Listings and the more traffic the web site will receive. The downside of pay-per-click, though is that you keep paying and paying and paying for the traffic. Soon you'ill spend way more on PPC than on the optimization services.

Press releases (PR's) are another great way to generate web site traffic. In the recent Search Engine Strategies seminars it was pointed out that the major search engine news feeds actually scan online press releases to see what they are about and rank them accordingly. So, just when you thought you could get away with writing standard press releases, now you would do well to write optimized press releases. The major SE's scan these press releases like they do an html page, looking for keywords in order to categorize and rank the release. If you have a timely story or happening about your site, write and submit an optimized press release on a place such as PRWeb.com and see your traffic grow. Or if you don't wish to do your own, there is a new business called SEO-PR who will do this for you.

There are many other methods in gaining web site traffic - too many to fully cover here. But to name a few, it is worth check out: article writing, opt-in email advertising, newsletter advertising (your own and others), give-aways, contests and promotions and banner advertisement.

A good idea once you gain traffic is to employ a website monitoring service such as that from Webmetrics to monitor your site for downtime. Too much downtime may mean the robots are unable to spider your site and will adversely affect your rankings.

Search engine optimization is not an end all and be all for everyone when it comes to generating more web site traffic. Many different and varied online marketing practices should be employed. When employing these other practices, though, don't neglect SEO because you can be sure your competition isn't neglecting it.