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How do I get traffic to my web site?

I was recently asked this question by a web site owner.

How do I get more traffic to my web site to sell (you fill in the blank)?

Let's call this part one. It's realistically part 2 or 3 for most people however.We could rename this title to "Tracking your web site traffic" because it is so important.

How do I get more traffic to my web site? An easy question to ask and more involved to answer. It depends on where you are in your evolution of Internet knowledge and experience. Do you have a well designed web site? Having a well designed web site might be step one. I mean well designed for search engines and people. What about your content? Is your content appealing? Is it well laid out? Do other good related web sites link to you because it's interesting and well laid out? If you have not yet purchased a domain name, you could also buy one that has keywords that match your business or subject of interest.

Where does most of the web's traffic come from? Chances are very high that the majority of your current traffic comes from search engines right? Right? Do you really know? If you do not know where your web site's traffic comes from then let us make that step one. After you get a domain name and make a web page, you NEED to setup some good (useful and informative) traffic tracking. These are also known as web site statistics packages.

You need to know how much traffic you are getting. You might have the web statistics application from whoever hosts your web site offer you one for free. That's a good start. Use it. Make sure you know the difference between hits and unique visitors. These terms get thrown around far too loosely. Unique visitors is mostly what I look for. I also like to see where my web site traffic comes from.

Those free web site traffic tracking packages you get with your web hosting provider is OK but they are somewhat limited.

The first limitation is location. If you move your web site to another host, you have to start all over again with all new data because all of yours is gone for good. Another limitation is that these packages are setup on the host server to a certain configuration so that you might see the top 10 referrers (the sites who send you traffic) for example. What if you want to see the top 20? Unless you have a hosting account with more rights which allow you to configure your account and you have the technical expertise and time to modify the variables you are interested in, you get what you get. Well you get what you pay for.

Most of the time you get what you pay for in this world. Sometimes you can do better than this. Web site traffic tracking has gone through some interesting changes over the years. For a while, you could get really good traffic reporting at no charge from companies like Webtrends. I think it was web trends light or personal or something like that. Later you could only buy a service billed by the month or year and even later than that it seemed like the only good reporting could be had from the enterprise package for thousands of dollars. The web is littered with a lot of web site tracking sites out there that used to track hits for little or no charge. We have come full circle.

Now Google will track your traffic at no charge.

I am talking about good tracking. It moves with you like the old days. Just embed you tracking code into your html pages and it tracks everything for you. You can even setup goals. Goals allow you to track what percentage of visitors (pay-per-click) do something you want them to do once they get to your site. Google has a lot of motivation for giving away free stuff that's useful. So now you know how many people who searched for "purple widgets" went to your site. More importantly, the use of goals allows you to see the percentage of them that met your goal. Your goal might be to buy a purple widget, or it might be to fill out tee purple widget information request page, or watch the "Making Purple Widgets" movie page on your site.

There is definitely more to this topic of tracking than I have let on. A whole lot more. I will try to cover these topics on later articles. Please. Know your traffic. It is the foundation which must be in place to get more traffic, know what marketing works or does not work, and know what search engines and your customers find most informative about your site.

Let's recap:

Design your site well. Start with the right design/development team and technology. This will help make it much easier for people and search engines to navigate and find information on your site. It will also make it much easier to add new features and make quick changes. I cannot over emphasize choosing the right technology and team!
Publish interesting and useful information others will want to link to.
Track and evaluate your traffic regularly. Start this now.
Be patient. All changes take time to have an effect.