Category: Web Marketing

Analyzing Your Website Traffic – Part 1 Of 2


Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your Web host company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data – the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.

There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as “hits” and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be.

For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behaviour. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.

The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.

It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.

This article concludes with the second part of Analyzing Your Website Traffic.

Tagging Your Site For Traffic


Tagging: A viable, time-saving resource

Are you familiar with the latest craze sweeping the web? More and more savvy web users are turning to a new way of searching to find quality information that does not rely on traditional search engine algorithm. Fed up with sifting through pages and pages of irrelevant search engine results to find what they want, web users have switched to tagging as a viable, time-saving alternative to researching for distinct information. This new tagging trend is luring legions of Internet surfers.

Tagging is basically assigning keywords or tags to web content such as photos, web pages or blog posts. When a web user talks about tagging, he is simply referring to how he summarizes what his web page, picture or blog is all about.

With tagging, a user determines what the content is about and tag or labels it. This tag, maybe one or more words, provides a short description of the content or the category it conforms to. It is somewhat similar to bookmarking a web page on a user’s own computer sans the systematic categorizing methods like folders.

Also, instead of the entry being saved on his personal computer, it is saved on publicly available sites or social bookmarking sites that anyone can use to tag web content. Web surfers tag the content they find significant and these appear on the bookmarking sites. Other Internet users interested in the same subjects can then find real content or resources other users found useful.

The significance of tagging

Tagging helps web page owners to know what users are searching for. They then create web content that is relevant and easy to find. In the process, these contents will gain in popularity as well.

If a web page operator made a web page for an in-demand tag that everybody is searching for, he will definitely get highly targeted traffic. Other users who found the content of that good quality web page will bookmark the page making it rise in popularity. As it becomes more popular, more and more users will bookmark it paving the way for more traffic.

By tagging content, it gets to be evaluated by users who decide if the content is useful. If it is useful, free traffic will follow. Another thing with tagging is that a web owner can select several tags for each page in his site. This means a chance to rank high for many tags in the highly-trafficked bookmarking sites that use tags to organize information.

The long and short of tagging

In a nutshell, tagging gives a web owner another avenue for getting his site noticed by buyers without having to resort to advertising. It can also lead to other possibilities. More traffic can stimulate increase in sales, produce adSense income, and earn affiliate commissions. Other users can also subscribe to the web owner’s list. Web users know for a fact that in the web, it is all about traffic. Tagging can help generate a steady flow of traffic which ultimately leads to a solid business.

 

So, have you initiated tagging?