November 2006 Newsletter

Getting your website up and running is just the first step in your battle for Internet success. Now you need to make sure potential customers or other visitors are able to find it. Regardless of whether your website is for your business, or is simply a personal blog, you need visitors for the site to come to life.

There are a number of techniques for increasing your website traffic, and we'll briefly discuss ten of them here. While each of the following methods is significant enough to justify an article (or perhaps even a book) by itself, the following summaries should give you enough ideas to begin publicizing your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques

The current importance of Internet search engines as a driver of web traffic cannot be overstated. The higher a website is ranked in the results for a search for given keywords, the more customers are likely to visit that site. Proper implementation of Search Engine Optimization (or "SEO") techniques can result in your website placing much higher in search results than it would without such techniques. These methods include proper use of the keywords and keyword phrases on your page....

Your website is an important and relatively inexpensive marketing tool. Used properly, it can garner important sales leads. But, like all components of a successful marketing campaign, your website also needs ongoing attention, fine-tuning and adaptation based on customer preferences. Where are visitors located? Where do they go within your site? Why do they leave? What makes them stay? What pages lead them to action? How effective are your search engine marketing efforts? You can find these answers and more in your website statistics.

What Are Website Statistics?

To reap the strongest response from your website, its important to analyze and assess the different patterns and trends web visitors make when they navigation through it. This practice is called web analytics, or the process of measuring website visitors’ behavior. Your visitor traffic data is collected in log files, which are long scrolling text files stored on your server. You can open this file and find information you need. But, thankfully, we have advanced tools and web-based applications that do most of the time-intensive work for us.

Hit counters and website traffic statistic programs convert this raw log file data into usable formats including graphs and charts. These show traffic trends, such as busy times of the day, busy days of the week, month-over month comparisons, inbound traffic referral sources and popular website pages....

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