How to increase website Traffic

1. Optimize your website to be search-engine friendly. Submit it to various search engines and directories. In addition to major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask, Bing and MSN, it's worth submitting to lesser known web directories. If your website is listed in as many places as possible, it can boost your rankings in major search engines as well.

2 Make sure your title, description head, and header html tags accurately convey the subject of your site; search engine algorithms use these as keywords to categorize your site and direct relevant traffic.

3 Spread the word about your affiliate program by submitting it to affiliate program directories and contacting the owners of related websites.

4 Create a links page that will contain the links to other non-competing websites in the same industry. Contact the owners of other websites with your proposal to exchange links. You will add their link to your links page, and they will link to your website in return.

5 Post in forums. Visit the online discussion forums where people in your target market like to gather. Post useful responses to people's questions, and include a link to your website at the end of your post next to your name. Although you ultimately want to get your sig file with the link to your site seen as often as possible, don't overdo it with your posts, otherwise other forumites won't respect you, and therefore won't visit your site.

6 Comment on blogs. Visit other people's blogs on the topic related to your website. Most blogs allow you to add comments about the issues being discussed. Add insightful comments about the blog topics, and leave your website link. Your comment and your link will permanently remain on the blog website.

7 Create an e-mail "signature" - your name, your website address and a short tag-line describing the main benefit of your site. Set your e-mail program to automatically add your signature to every e-mail that you send.
 

8 Look into traffic exchanges. There are many types of traffic exchanges but the idea is the same - you team up with other webmasters, and they send you traffic in exchange for you sending them traffic. Search the web for "traffic exchange" to find those services.
 

9 Create something of value that people will pass around. It can be a report with useful information that you allow people to give away. It can also be some kind of cool and unusual web-page that people will want to e-mail to all their friends. Of course, the pass-around item will include your advertisement and your link, spreading the word about your website. This is a "viral" strategy.

10 Write articles on the topic related to your website, and include a link to your site in your author bio. Submit your articles to article directories, and allow people to publish your article in their newsletters and websites. Your articles will spread around the web like wildfire. People will read them and visit your website. The best part is that people who read your articles will regard you as an expert, and they will be much more likely to buy from you when they go to your website. How's that for a free publicity?
 

11 Use accurate keywords for your content. The point of keywords is that they are the terms most people looking for your article by topic will search by. Check those with free Google terms and use the most popular relevant one in your title - a descriptive title to let them know right away what it is if it's a word with multiple meanings. Drawing blood for a phlebotomist is not the same thing as a comics artist drawing blood in a fight scene. Be very literal and then use the exact keywords several times in the article where they are relevant, as well as synonyms. Don't overdo it, or you look like you're trying to spam Google. Just use the keywords naturally when describing the topic.

    If it is a confusing keyword phrase like Drawing Blood, link to the other meaning and mention that in the first paragraph. "This article is about drawing blood in graphic novels. Phlebotomy is drawing blood for medical tests or donations - here's the other page on "Drawing Blood." Then link to the phlebotomy page in that. By redirecting confused people you leave them a good impression and they might stop to read your article if they also like doing comics art!

12 Start an e-zine for your web site. When people read each issue they'll be reminded to revisit your web site. Submit it to all the free e-zine directories on the internet.A news letter!
 

13 Start your own online discussion community. It could be an online message board, e-mail discussion list or chat room. When people get involved in your community, they will regularly return to communicate with others.
 

14 Advertise your site at free classified ad sites. There are many of these on the net. Some of the more popular ones are craigslist, inetgiant, freeadvertisingforum, and gumtree.
 

15 Join free safe-lists. These are lists of subscribers who have opted-in to send and receive emails to each other. You can instantly reach potentially thousands of people by sending out emails, and you don't have to worry about receiving spam complaints either because everyone on the list has opted-in to receive emails.
 

16 Getting a myspace page could also increase your site traffic because hundreds of people will see it.
 

17 Constantly update content on your web-page, so having a news section is a great deal for search engines especially.
 

18 Update your Facebook status to let your friends know everytime you update your blog and create a Facebook fan page. Your friend's friends will see when they join the fan page or comment on your status.
 

19 Submit your website to top social bookmarking sites to create a back link to your website, which will increase you page rank as well.
 

20 Sign up to yahoo answers and leave great helpful comments to questions people are asking for, leaving a link back to your site with more helpful tips on it.
 

21 Stay on topic. All this socializing, forum commenting and question answering ought to be on your website's main topic. The more your activity and site content match in topic, the more likely the right people find it. The more targeted your affiliate links are to the topic, the better you'll do with them too. People don't mind advertising that's on topic, it starts to look like a convenience directory rather than irritating commercials.

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How to Track Your Website’s Traffic

As long as you have a website, you should be tracking the traffic your website gets – for many reasons. Knowing these details can help boost traffic, future growth and can save a massive amount of time by knowing which websites you should be advertising on, partnering with or commenting on blogs or forums. You need to know how visitors got to your site:

Referring Sites

Knowing about other sites who refer traffic to you is vital to your website, it tells you who is helping you and who is not. Use these numbers to see which sites you should be putting more effort into. If you’re putting minimal effort into a site that gives you a good amount of traffic, then you may benefit more from putting forth more effort into that site and maximize your input:output ratio. On the other hand, if you’re spending a lot of time on a site that gives you little or no traffic, you will see it’s most likely a waste of your time and effort.

Direct Traffic

Your direct traffic is also good to know, but not as important as referring site data. Most direct traffic visits are from visitors who know your website address or have bookmarked it. This is good to monitor to see if your direct traffic increases. It is very good to have high direct traffic numbers, which means the visitors are coming straight to you repeatedly, instead of happening to find you on the internet.

Keywords

When people search on internet the words they type in the search box are called keywords. Keyword statistics will tell you which keywords got visitors to click on, which brought them to your website. This data is also useful by seeing which pages were landed on most often, you will know

which pages/posts are more in demand and you can change keywords on less visited pages to potentially get more page visits.

Search Engines

Knowing which search engines refer you the most traffic is important because each search engine has a different algorithm. Your website may come up higher in rankings in one search engine over another. Most businesses should primarily concentrate on Google traffic, However; it may depend on the type of business and location. Seattle area businesses should also target Bing because Microsoft is located here and a mass of customers work here, which they primarily use Bing for web searches.

There are also many other helpful tracking statistics, such as visitors geographic location, what browser viewers are using, how long they stay on your website, what pages they visit, what page they leave from, how many returning visitors you get and many more. All of these tracking details ultimately mesh together and tell you how many unique visits, returning visits and hits your website gets. Each tracking platform calculates differently and has different tracking options. The list below will highlight some different tracking tools so you can decide what would work best for you and your website.

Google Analytics

Analytics is the tool of all tools. This tool requires code insertion on all pages of your website that you want tracked. Nearly all sitebuilder platforms and WordPress websites have a place to plugin your tracking code, which makes it very fast and easy to get going. With this script you may potentially lose valuable data from visitors who may have certain codes disabled, have high security settings or may be on a mobile device that does not support a code. However, Analytics has so many statistics I could write an entire blog post on just that. If you want a stat, most likely Google Analytics has it. I love that Analytics is also visually pleasing for the eye. Not only do they have charts and graphs of all kinds, but they have a unique ‘page layout’ view that adds a transparent layer over your website showing you the percentages of clicks on your page links, so you can physically see where the clicks are, rather than seeing them in chart form (in reporting only, not the live website).

Ovaleye’s Web Hosting Stats

When you have a website hosted with Ovaleye, you also get complimentary real-time logfile analyzer to get advanced statistics. Ovaleye uses the AWStats Platform which is an extraordinary tool that requires no website verification or code insertion. Included in the webstats are helpful tools such as: visits, unique visits, hits, day of week visits, traffic rush hours, most viewed pages, entry and exit pages, and on and on. This tool is very useful and can be used by a website owner on any knowledge level. These statistics are very useful alone, or by comparing the data to Google’s data. Web server statistics are different than Google stats in a few ways; Some visitors may have certain code languages disabled, have high security settings or may be on a mobile device that does not support a code, in which the Google tool may not be able to track data. The downside is that web server stats also include administrative website logins and bot visits, which are not technically true visits. The most accurate results would be numbers somewhere in between web server and code/script tracking data.

Google’s Webmaster Tools

This is another great tool that is simple to use and does require site verification, but not code installation. Webmaster Tools provides less data than the Ovaleye statistics, but is very useful. A few of the features I like are downloadable spreadsheets of links to and from your website, Google data such as pagerank and ability to submit your sitemap to Google; Diagnostics such as page errors, URL’s not followed and timeouts. There are also advanced settings you can configure to specify crawl rate, preferred domain name appearance, and more. This data is strictly how Google views your website, which is the most widely used search engine, but if you prefer another search engine perhaps you would prefer another tracking tool.

Between all of these tools, there is most likely one that will suit your needs best. On some of my websites I prefer comparing Ovaleye’s stats with Google Analytics and figuring my actual numbers are somewhere in between the two, whereas on some of my other websites I just use Ovaleye’s tools.

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