Friday, October 31, 2008

Monitoring And Increasing Your Website Traffic

By Don Bethune

The number of visitors to a particular website is known as website traffic. The overall definition includes how many times and how many pages each visitor uses. If you operate a website, it is important to monitor your traffic so that you can decipher particular trends and see what is working for you.

Web traffic monitoring is therefore of great importance if you are operating a website. The information gathered from web traffic monitoring is usually used to help in structuring of sites, potential lack of bandwidth and security problems if there are any.

Traffic monitoring is used as a way to determine how popular a website is. If you know how many people are visiting your website and exactly what they are looking at, you can see what areas are not working well and work on improving them. This is often the first step to increase your traffic.

You can also utilize the search engines in order to increase website traffic. If your website does not appear in the first few listings of a search, there is a good chance that nobody will ever see your content, no matter how good it is. And if one of your rivals is listed near the top, your chances slip down even further. Most people do not look any farther than the first few results, so getting your name up near the top is crucial.

Traffic to the website can also be increased using paid advertisement. By paying small amounts, we can advertise our site on other popular sites. The popular ways of advertising in this way is the Cost Per Impression (CPM), and the Pay per Click methods.

The domain name of the website also helps in increasing the traffic to the website. If the name of the website is simple and somehow related to the content provided therein, visitors often do not need to go to the search engines. They try to just remember the name of the website.

You can also offer to write articles for other sites. This can increase traffic whenever you place a link to your site in the article. Although these articles are generally done without compensation, the increase in traffic to your site will make them well worth your time.

Thus search engines, paid advertising are few ways to get traffic. But the most important part is that your site must contain some useful material for the visitors. If they find the website useful, they will come to the website again and will also refer the website to their friends. - 15275

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