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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.
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