Web Traffic

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Web Traffic - How To Get It

By Richard Legg

Web Traffic Analysis Companies

After sometime, you will be thinking of how your online business progresses. You have done your part-creating and designing your own site, the inclusion of all the stuffs that you want to sell, and availing different methods of advertising.

It will now be judged by the web public if that effort is enough to give you what you really deserve. Through web traffic that occurs in your site, you will determine if it really works out the way you planned it.

You can have your own web traffic system, though for majority of website administrators, they hire the services of companies that offer web traffic analysis. They specialized in monitoring the amount of incoming and outgoing traffic in your site, particularly some parts that are most viewed. It helps in expanding and improving further the site.

How these companies track and analyze the amount of web traffic in your website. You can check the preceding section for you to find out.

Web Traffic Analysis Tracking Software

Traffic analysis is one of the imperative aspects of a website. You can not promote your site effectively if you do not know the amount of traffic in your site plus the popular entry and exit points in it.

Professional and commercial web traffic analysis companies use tracking software. It is one of the programs that they are using to analyze web traffic. It informs them more than just the number of visitors in your site, but it can classify visitors according to date, time, browser, pages viewed, and other relative details.

It can tell you the exact path a visitor takes in your site. So it is more than just counting the amount of traffic. There are three types of tracking software that is used by these companies. These are discussed in the preceding sections.

Remote Tracking System

It is the most popular tracking system. It records all the traffic reporting in a remote server, which you can log on to check your site's statistics. It is recorded through JavaScript that can be found in your webpage.

Despite of its popularity, this type of tracking system is hardly used by professional traffic analysis companies for some reason. First, it is often inaccurate because the recording is only relying on the connection to a remote server, where requests simply times out. It leads to unrecorded visitors.

Another is that if your system does not support JavaScript, the tracking software is no use at all. Most of the search engine spiders do not use JavaScript and the benefits of analyzing the web traffic on your site are non-existent.

Logging Programs

These are scripts that are installed on your server that generate log files. It enables you to control what is logged and what is not, thus you can track the pages that you want to track.

Another advanced feature of this type of system is that you can use it to track links from your site as well. It will give you an idea how much traffic you are sending in a link exchange.

Log Analysis Programs

It analyzes your server logs that will serve as basis in reporting intercepted traffic in the site. It includes advance filters that allow you to determine exactly what you want to be reported, although most of the time it reports everything that is saved in the log files.

Benefits of Web Traffic Analysis Companies

As stressed in the previous sections, the reason why we hire such companies is to help us improve our sites. Forced shutdowns of sites are caused by improper handling of web traffic, especially of huge one. It is important to have such aforementioned tracking software to have a daily estimate of the visitors in your site. It will also save you from damages that can be caused by virus-carrying files.

Web traffic is not just your visitors and the transfer of millions of data or files. Your business is at stake here; so do not ever neglect all the aspects of your site. Either you profit or lose money will depend on how you manage your site.

Don't have a web traffic consultant? You should avail of their services now.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Why Should I Analyze My Web Traffic

By Joseph Iervolino

Interpreting the data you collect from your website traffic
statistics is a very valuable tool however you will first need
to learn how to read this information.

When requesting this data, most web hosting companies
will provide you with basic web traffic information that you
then have to work out and make use of. However, this data
will be overwhelming if you don't understand how to utilize
it to your particular business or website.

These numbers are a perfect evaluation of your website
activity. This still does not mean your website is doing well
since it depends on the visitor and their actions when
they are at your site. This will give you a better measure of the
effectiveness of your site.

Try not to concentrate too much on how many hits you get
to your website because this kind of traffic is not useful
quality traffic, it is just a measure of information requests
received from server. The concept of hits is very exaggerated
measuring tool. For example, if your homepage
has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits,
when in reality we are talking about a single visitor
checking out a single page on your site. As you can see,
hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The more visitors that come to your website, the more
precise your analysis will be. The greater the traffic is
to your website, the more accurate your study
will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller
the number of visitors, the greater the chance of erroneous
data.

What you want to do is figure out how your site is catering to
your visitors. To do this you must figure out how much time
a visitor is spending at your site. If it is short then there may
be a problem that must be addressed. Check if your keywords
are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that
your graphics are not intimidating, causing the visitor to exit
in a hurry. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are
spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and
after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as
an estimate of how effective your fix has been.

Furthermore, web traffic stats can help you resolve
effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you
have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are
exiting it quickly, that page needs attention. One thing you
can do is make the link look a bit more noticeable or
attractive, this will entice your visitor. Also you might want
to improve the look of that page to help a visitor find or access
the information they are looking for.

If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are
spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less
essential, you might want to consider moving your sales copy
to those pages.

As you can see, these statistics will divulge very important
information about the effectiveness of individual pages,
and why visitor are motivated to stay on those pages.
This is necessary information to for the success of any
internet related marketing campaign.

It is very important to observe your exit pages, because it
is the page you can expect your visitor to leave your site.
Because, not every visitor on your site is going to find exactly
what he or she is looking for, statistics may show you a number
of different working exit pages. Now this is normal unless
you notice a tendency to exit on a particular page that is not
intended as an exit page. In the case that a significant percentage
of visitors are exiting your website on a page not designed for that
purpose, you must closely observe that particular page to
determine what the problem is. Once you locate possible
weaknesses on that page, you should make the necessary
modifications in content or graphics. This in turn will have a
significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your
site instead of exiting at the wrong page.

After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it's time
to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if certain
keywords are calling a specific type of visitor to your
site. The more targeted the visitor - meaning that they
find what they are looking for on your site, and even
better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase - the
more valuable that keyword is.

However, if you find a large number of visitors are being
directed by your misdirecting keywords, then those keyword
demand adjustments. Remember, keywords are fundamental in
bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business
with you. Close examination of the keywords your visitors are
using to find your site will give you a crucial understanding of your
visitor's needs and motivations.

Finally, if you notice that users are discovering your website
by typing in your company name, break open the Spumate!
This means you are achieving a significant level of brand
recognition, and this is a sure sign of growth and improvement.

Generating Targeted Website Traffic

By Michael Pine

Web site traffic is every website owners wettest dream.

These are the kind of visitors that you would want to attract, those who are already interested in your websites product or services.

This is the reason why your visitors should be highly targeted ones. Now, you may be wondering, what is the best way to get targeted website traffic coming over to your site?

Take it from the expert. Below are some of the things that have proved effective for them in increasing their web site traffic.

1. Search engine optimization. This should be at the front most of your mind. anyway you put it, in the online world, search engine rules, most specifically Google. Search engines are the best way to get noticed in an affordable manner.

2. RSS. Blogs and RSS feeds go hand in hand. Since more people are blogging thanks to Blogger, Myspace, Wordpress and countless others, website owners are finding blogs as becoming a valuable tool in getting website traffic. Once you inject RSS feeds into your blogs, expect a great number of targeted website traffic to come pouring into your site.

3. Viral marketing. This is a fantastic way of getting more website traffic. All you to do is giving something of value to your prospective customers. If this is something they can use immediately and see instant results it will build you fans/clients for life.

A great example of this might be a tutorial on how to create new blogs quickly and how to syndicate them across the Internet. As you can see this is a very powerful tool in getting someone started.

The viral marketing techniques you run should always be brandable reports so your new friends share with there friends who share with there friends. If your report is good, it can end up in thousands if not hundreds of thousands of peoples email/computers and create a legion of supporters.

4. Articles marketing. This method works big time, which is why you are reading this now. Once you are on one of the many article directories other website owners will include your articles in there newsletters and syndicate them in there website using RSS, or simply copy and pasting them into a blog.

The most important thing in article writing is to be informative, and provide a real valuable service to the people reading about whatever topic you are writing about. Try to keep the fluff out and keep the articles to 450-650 words or less. In this case Less is often More.

Always do keyword research before jumping on the article bandwagon. make sure your article is optimized to match your page as well as the topic being written about.

5. Ezines. If you have an existing E-Zine/Newsletter, this is one of the best ways to communicate with your audience and share tips, tricks, and freebies with them.

Your E-Zine should be as closely related to the topic of your site and provides information that will be helpful. You will realize that once you continuously manage your site based on a single focus, you will become an expert in that field. Once you are considered an expert, visitors will come looking for you to seek out ideas and suggestions.

There are other sources of website traffic that can work well also but they may not be as effective as the ones mentioned above. Forums are another great traffic builder, though keeping up on posting to multiple forums can be very time consuming.

Generating website traffic is a continuous process that website owners have to maintain. Try to use the techniques that the experts have found to be beneficial. Or you can come up with your own strategies.