Effective Ways To Increase Web Traffic Growth
For all people, it is very important for you to get your message out to the world. One of the most effective ways to be able to do this is by Internet Marketing, the marketing and promotion of products or services over the internet. Internet Marketing has expanded in recent years, and the ongoing competition among online-business owners to increase website traffic has grown. There are many innovative ways to increase traffic to your website. Some cost money and some don’t. Below, you’ll find a comprehensive explanation of what Web Traffic is, what information is being collected, how to analyze it, and how to control your web traffic to boost the number of visitors to your website.
What is Web Traffic?
Web Traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. This is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit. In other words, web sites are responsible for monitoring the incoming and outgoing traffic to see which parts or pages of their site are popular and if there are any apparent trends. The amount of traffic seen by a web site is a measure of its popularity. By analyzing the statistics of visitors it is possible to see shortcomings of the site and look to improve those areas and to increase (or, in some cases decrease) the popularity of a site and the number of people that visit it. Web Traffic can also be used to highlight security problems or indicate a potential lack of bandwidth.
What information is collected using Web Traffic?
- The number of visitors
- The average number of page views per visitor – a high number would indicate that the average visitors go deep inside the site, possibly because they like it or find it useful
- Average visit duration – the total length of a user’s visit. As a rule the more time they spend the more they’re interested in your company and are more prone to contact
- Average page duration – how long a page is viewed for. The more pages viewed, the better it is for your company
- Domain classes – all levels of the IP Addressing information required to deliver web pages and content
- Busy times – the most popular viewing time of the site would show when would be the best time to do promotional campaigns and when would be the most ideal to perform maintenance
- Most requested pages – the most popular pages
- Most requested entry pages – the entry page is the first page viewed by a visitor and shows which are the pages most attracting visitors
- Most requested exit pages – the most requested exit pages could help find bad pages, broken links or the exit pages may have a popular external link
- Top paths – a path is the sequence of pages viewed by visitors from entry to exit, with the top paths identifying the way most customers go through the site
- Referrers –the host can track the (apparent) source of the hyperlink URL and establish which sites are generating the most traffic for a particular page.
How to analyze Web Traffic
Web Traffic can be analyzed by viewing the traffic statistics found in the web server log file, an automatically generated list of all the pages served. Anytime a file is served, a hit is generated. The web page itself and the images are considered files. For example, 1 (web page) + 5 (images) = 6 hits
A page view is generated when a visitor requests any page within the web site – a visitor will always generate at least one page view (the main page) but could generate many more.
Some ways to analyze Web Traffic is by:
- Using Web Analytics (the measurement of the behavior of visitors to a website) with the following available software:
- Coremetrics
- Omniture
- Google Analytics
- Web Trends
- Inserting a small piece of HTML code in every page of the web site to track applications external to the web site and record traffic
- Packet sniffing to gain random samples of traffic data and extrapolate information about web traffic as a whole across total Internet usage
How do you control your Web Traffic?
Limiting access
It is sometimes important to protect some parts of a site with a password and only permit authorized people to visit particular sections or pages.Some site administrators choose to block their page to specific traffic, such as by geographic location. For example, the re-election campaign site for U.S. President George W. Bush (GeorgeWBush.com) was blocked to all internet users outside of the U.S. on 25 October 2004 after a reported attack on the site.
It is also possible to limit access to a web server based on the number of connections and by the bandwidth expended by each connection. One way to accomplish this is by using limitpconn – an Apache module, written in Perl Scripting Language, which allows web server administrators to limit the number of simultaneous downloads permitted from a single IP address module.
Using Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The majority of website traffic is driven by search engines. Millions of people use search engines every day to research various topics, buy products, and go about their daily surfing activities. Search engines use keywords to help users find relevant information and each of the major search engines has developed a unique algorithm to determine where websites are placed within the search results. When a user clicks on one of the listings in the search results, they are directed to the corresponding website and data is transferred from the website’s server, thus counting the visitors towards the overall flow of traffic to that website.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the ongoing practice of optimizing a website to help improve its rankings in the search engines. The higher a site ranks within the search engines for a particular keyword, the more traffic they will receive. Some ways to help improve a site’s listing within the search engines are by:
- Providing a product to be consumed
- Creating Unique Content on your Web Page
- Creating Keyword Rich Text (These keywords are used by the search engine spiders to figure out what that particular page and chunk of content is about. If you don’t have any keywords the spiders won’t know what to do with it and it may get categorized wrong or even worse, lost forever in the bowels of Google)
- Using good design sense to improve your site to bring back viewers
- Making your website a community by encouraging comments and making content that will stimulate conversation to help build up your repeat customer user base
- Creating Backlinks
- Making sure to use <meta> tags and <title> tags in your HTML Code
Increasing Web Site Traffic
If a web page is not listed in the first pages of any search, the odds of someone finding it diminishes greatly (especially if there is other competition on the first page). Very few people go past the first page, and the percentage that goes to subsequent pages is substantially lower. Consequently, getting proper placement on search engines is as important as the web site itself.
Web site traffic can increase by:
- Figuring out what key words and phrases are going to be important to your site (run them through tools such as WordTracker, Google keyword tool, or Yahoo Overture Keyword Selector Tool to see what the volume of search activity is)
- Making it your “career” to get links into your site
- Starting a blog and participating in other blogs(helps increase SEO by adding new keywords to your web page)
- Placing site(s) in search engines
- Purchasing advertising, including bulk e-mail, pop-up ads, and in-page advertisements
- Purchasing through web traffic providers or non-internet based advertising
- Encouraging viewers to delve deeper into the site using branching paths of information (i.e. the possibilities of working with your product)
Did you know?
Organic traffic
Organic Traffic is web traffic that comes from unpaid listing at search engines or directories. It can be generated or increased by including the web site in directories, search engines, guides (such as yellow pages and restaurant guides), and award sites.
In most scenarios, the best way to increase web traffic is to register it with the major search engines. But, just registering does not guarantee traffic. In order for search engines to work more efficiently, it has to utilize crawlers (also known as spiders or robots), a program that searches the World Wide Web, typically in order to create an index of data,on registered web sites.
A crawler starts at the registered home page. They frequently follow the hyperlinks to get to pages inside the web site (internal links). Then, the crawlers start gathering information about those pages, store it, and then index it in the search engine database. Most of the times, the HTML Meta Tag (provides metadata, such as page descriptions and keywords, about the HTML document), URL, title, and a certain amount of text are indexed.
When a search engine user looks for a particular word or phrase, the search engine looks into the database and produces the results, sorted by relevance according to the search engine algorithms. Very often, the top organic result gets most of the clicks from web users.
Note:
Because of the huge amount of information available on the web, crawlers might take days, weeks or even months to complete review and index all the pages they find. Google, for example, as of the end of 2004 had indexed over eight billion pages. Even having hundreds or thousands of servers working on the spidering of pages, a complete re-indexing takes its time. That is why some pages recently updated in certain web sites are not immediately found when doing searches on search engines.
Traffic Overload
Too much web traffic can dramatically slow down or even prevent all access to a web site. This is caused by more file requests going to the server than it can handle and may be an intentional attack on the site or simply caused by over-popularity. Large scale web sites with numerous servers can often cope with the traffic required and it is more likely that smaller services are affected by traffic overload. Sudden traffic load may also hang your server or may result in shutdown of your services.
Denial of service attacks
Denial-of-service attacks (DoS attacks) have forced web sites to close after a malicious attack, flooding the site with more requests than it could cope with. Viruses have also been used to co-ordinate large scale distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Sudden popularity
A sudden burst of publicity may accidentally cause a web traffic overload. A news item in the media, a quickly propagating email, or a link from a popular site may cause such a boost in visitors (sometimes called a flash crowd or the Slashdot Effect)
Glossary
- Crawlers: A program that searches the World Wide Web, typically in order to create an index of data, on registered web sites. Also known as spiders or robots.
- Denial-of-service-attacks (DoS attacks): A malicious attack on a website with viruses. It floods the site with more requests than it can cope with.
- HTML Meta Tag: Provides metadata, such as page descriptions and keywords, about the HTML document.
- Internet Marketing: The marketing and promotion of products or services over the Internet. Also known as online advertisement, internet marketing, online marketing or e-marketing.
- Limitpconn: An Apache module, written in Perl Scripting Language, which allows web server administrators to limit the number of simultaneous, downloads permitted from a single IP address module.
- Organic Traffic: Web traffic that comes from unpaid listing at search engines or directories.
- Page View: Generated when a visitor requests any page within the web site.
- Search Engines: Uses keywords to help users find relevant information.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The ongoing practice of optimizing a website to help improve its rankings in the search engines.
- Sudden Popularity: A boost in visitors to a site that may cause traffic overload. Can be caused by sudden popularity via ads or links on other sites. Also known as Flash Crowd or Slashdot Effect.
- Traffic Overload: A problem caused by more file requests going to the server than it can handle.
- Web Analytics: The measurement of the behavior of visitors to a website.
- Web Server Log File: An automatically generated list of all the pages served.
- Web Traffic: The amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site.
