How to bring more traffic to your web site.

By Tony Cooper
Posted Saturday, September 25, 2004

Where do you start? There are a plethora of ways that you can use to bring quality traffic to your web site and I’m going to touch on some of the main ones here.

First of all though, let’s define what we mean by “quality traffic”

Many people try to judge their web sites growth or success simply by measuring the amount of traffic that their web site receives. Whilst this is not a bad indicator in itself, it can be deceiving and you need to understand the difference in types of traffic so that you are aware of the overall goal, in terms of traffic, for your web site

When examining your web site statistics don’t make the mistake of confusing “hits” with “unique visitors” and “visits”. They are all entirely separate entities.

“Hits” are the combination of the page being loaded in a surfers browser and then adding a hit for every graphic loaded on that page. Hence if you have a page with hundreds of graphics resident then it will register more hits than a text page, even though both comparable pages have been loaded only once.

“Hits” are a misnomer in web traffic analysis and should be discounted.

“Unique visitors” are the amount of new visitors that visit your pages who have never visited before. This is a good indicator of your sites progress.

“Visits” are the total amount of visits by new and unique surfers and returning surfers. Ultimately your goal is to build on the amount of returning surfers so that you don’t have to work as hard attracting new customers. This is the purpose of email newsletters.

So now that you can decipher the main part of your statistics log, let’s look at what we mean by “quality” traffic.

Quality traffic is visitors that come to your site actively looking to purchase your product or service or read the information that you are providing. The better quality traffic that you have, the higher your conversion rate (percentage of buyers or subscribers to visitors).

Poor traffic generally arrives from “fringe keywords”. These are the keywords that you have not necessarily targeted in your marketing strategy but get top listings for subjects outside of your core business. The conversion rate for your “fringe keywords” is considerably lower than for your quality traffic.

So now that we have put the goalposts in place we can start to concentrate on bringing quality traffic to our site.

First of all choose the correct keywords that people are actively searching for. To do this go to (http://www.wordtracker.com) and use the free trial. Key in a popular phrase that you think would be used to find your site and word tracker will tell you the words that are actively being used to search the web.

This removes any guesswork from your planning and gives you a concrete platform for finding keywords which to build your marketing campaigns.

Once you have identified your keywords then you can begin to build each page of your site around one keyword phrase. Use the keyword phrase in your page title, your page heading and your page text and you have covered all of the major bases in optimising your pages for quality search engine traffic.

Now it's time to start monitoring your traffic. If you don't watch your hard gained traffic then you are not going to be in a position to capitalise on opportunity.

There is much traffic to be gained from analysis. Especially in the early days of a web sites life, your visitor logs can be a goldmine as far as gaining more traffic is concerned.

First of all, look for obscure or strange phrases turning up in your keyword phrases unexpectedly. Very often they can give you a clue or hint to what information surfers are really trying to find. Often this can be a sign of a new opportunity and your signal to make a new page to capture this traffic.

Next, look at your entry pages. Which pages are found the most in search engines? Which pages need work to make them more visible? It's important that you bring under performing pages up to speed as it often requires a minimal effort to do so.

Exit pages. Which pages are exited the most? If it's the home page then you may need to improve the content.

Traversals. This is one of the most important stats as it shows a pattern of pages that are surfed and hopefully you should build up a clear picture of traffic flow through your site. Once you have this information you can build the content into the pages to suit your target audience.

In summary.

Knowing which statistical terms are which is important. Once you know your hits from your Unique visitors you can start measuring your web sites performance.

Once you have been examining your web site logs for a couple of months you should become proficient at identifying traffic trends and be in a position to make the most of them.

This article may be reprinted free in it's entirety providing you include this resource box.

About the Author
Tony Cooper is the Internet Marketing manager at (http://www.keywordmarketing.com) Building web sites that achieve tangible and accountable results.

Web site statistics and analytical tracking (http://www.visitorlogs.com)

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