WHAT IS WEBSITE TRAFFIC?
December 11th, 2006WHAT IS WEBSITE TRAFFIC?
Website traffic is defined as the number of visitors and visits to a website. Initially, at the start of the dotcom phenomenon, website traffic was considered as the most important factor in reckoning how successful a website was; but recently, it is more about profitability, i.e. how much of the increased website actually converts to money. Therefore, return on investment (ROI) is an important factor which is being considered these days.
Increased website traffic is crucial to your online business. To put it simply, more website traffic, means more business. As the number of visitors to your site increases, so does the number of potential customers and more are the chances of increased sales. So if you want to make money, you have just got to increase your website traffic.
Just how important is increasing website traffic? Creating a beautiful website without making efforts to increase website traffic to it, is just like creating an advertisement without getting it printed or creating a T.V. Commercial without airing it. Your website will be totally redundant in the online business world if you do not optimize it for the search engines.
The key to increasing the website traffic to your site is to fully optimize it for higher rankings in the search engine page results (SERP) of the major search engines. You will have to undertake SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques to get these higher rankings and greater visibility on these search engine page results. Higher will be the rankings on the SERP, more will be the traffic to your website.
Some of the basic on- page SEO techniques are explained below
1) Identifying your target user- you should thoroughly know the basic profile of the audience or user you want to visit your website, before you begin writing content for them. You should know precisely what your user is looking for.
2) Researching and identifying effective keywords and keyword phrases- you should research and identify those keywords which best relates to the content of your website and would lead users to it in search engines.
3) Quality content- writing unique, interesting and quality content is the most important technique and crucial to higher rankings on search engines. The content should be compelling enough to draw the user back frequently to the site as well as recommend it to friends.
4) Optimized title tag- this is used in the indexing by search engines and also when sites are bookmarked by users, so it is important that they are optimized with the key word or keyword phrases.
5) Optimization of key words and Meta description tags.
6) Site should be user friendly;
a. simple and interesting content
b. avoid time consuming graphics which take time to load
c. Text should be simple to read.
d. Keywords are the foundation of SEO techniques and use the key words and keyword phrases appropriately and meaningfully in the content without key word stuffing (spamming).
WHAT DOESN’T ATTRACT WEBSITE TRAFFIC?
1) Lack of the right keywords and key word phrases; if your choice of he key words and key word phrases in your content is not targeted, it can spoil the chances of increasing website traffic. If you want your website to be displayed for a particular keyword, but that’s not the key word you have optimized in your website, then you could lose a lot of traffic.
2) Inappropriate and poor content- if your website has content which is not rich or engaging, or just plain boring, is never updated or is irrelevant to your product or service you are offering, chances are your site will be by-passed by the search engines. Also, it is essential that they possess the targeted key words and phrases.
3) Black Hat SEO techniques – these can also get your site banned by search engines if you are found d o be using techniques such as key word stuffing, doorway pages and invisible text.
4) Meta tags which have been improperly used the key word tags, the Meta tags and the description tags should have the targeted key words and used in every page of the site.
5) Badly designed site - if your site does not have easy navigation, graphics which are time consuming and frames which are poorly designed, then you can be sure that the visitor will quickly find another site.
So if you have an online commercial website and want to generate more business and expand it, you need more website traffic. And for the same, you need to adopt SEO techniques.
The cost of incorporating SEO techniques for your website depends upon the time you have on hand and your budget. Also you could consider how much (ROI) you want.
Author
Naveen Kapur
Attract More Google Traffic.