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Publicity for your site - getting traffic to your pages |
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What is web site traffic? Web traffic is the number of visitors who look at your site. Its a bit more indepth than that - you might want to know how many people have looked at certain pages, how many pages people look at. Examining the traffic is very useful as you can learn a lot about your site by carefully monitoring and examining the way people use it. | ||
| | How
do you measure traffic? Well you can install a counter on your pages and then monitor the reports. Each counter available has different facilities. For a list of counters click here. You can also monitor the log files of your domain name. | |
| | Importance
of links Links within your site are important - its the only way people will be able to get through your pages (Unless you've got a site for psychics). They're also important for search engines to be able to navigate your site when their little spiders and robots come to index you. | |
| | How
to Increase Traffic - first measure traffic Before you can increase traffic, you must know how much traffic you're currently getting. If you haven't already then look at the counters page, decide which counter you want and instal it. Then wait a week, and go look at your stats. (Bookmark this page and write a note in your diary to come back) Back already? So you know how much traffic you have in a week. Can you see from the stats where the traffic is coming from? Whether you've been found through the search engines, or usenet, or from email? Whats the daily breakdown like? Are you surprised? Can you tell what countries people are coming from? Can you see how many pages are being looked at? Make a note of the first weeks figures so that you can make a comparison in a couple of weeks times. Some counters allow you to save reports (Or show weekly analysis) - but sometimes you might want to print out the pages and keep a copy safe somewhere. (I'm a great believer in the paperless office -but I just like to be able to lie on the sofa and work!) | |
| | Generating
Traffic Don't SPAM! Don't ever ever ever ever ever ever SPAM. (Thats force feeding by email or newsgroups messages about your site) Spamming is Sooooooooooo bad. So how do you get traffic? Well one good way would be to be at the top of the search engines (or in the top 10-20). Think about this ... when you search for something ... how many results do you look at? Probably not more than 20. So thats how important it is to be in the top 20 hits for your keywords. Read Analysing Search Engines for more information about search engines and keywords | |
| | Free
(and easy) Ways to Increase Traffic You post to newsgroups? Well if you do, then you should have a sig file which mentions your site. You can also have a sig file on emails but it really depends how many people you email each day whether you'd get any significant traffic through email sig files. A good sig file is less than 5 lines long. It should include the URL and a snappy sentence to tempt people over to the site. So you could have something like "www.yourdomainname.com The Cheapest Christmas Decorations by Post" That should tempt people over who are interested in christmas decorations by post. Another simple and free way to get traffic -although it'll only be a small amount extra - is to sign guestbooks and include your URL. Now you could spend hours searching the Internet and sign every guestbook going - you'd spend an awful lot of time doing this though, for very little reward. What you can do to make this more effective is sign guestbooks of sites relating to your own subject matter. Perhaps complimenting the site author on a great site and asking for a link to your site. (You could also email the site author if its a great site - or they don't have a guestbook requesting a link.) By targetting similar sites to your own your link will be read by people interested in similar subject matter - people who might well visit your site and bookmark it. | |
| | Linking
to sites By having links with other sites and contacting other sites of a similar nature you might well collect quite a few links from other sites. Links are measured by search engines. Goto altavista and type in link:yourdomainname.com How many links have you got to your site? Search for one of your keywords and for the top ten do a check on the number of links to each site. Most of them will have lots of links. Have a look at who links to who. Will some of these sites add links to your site? | |