You have a web site. You have web site visitors. You even have web site sales. Everything seems to be working: why should you go through the effort to track and analyze your web site traffic? The fact is, the importance of tracking your site traffic is not stressed nearly enough. At most, people say, “Sure, I track my site traffic. We had 5,000 hits last month!” But that, quite frankly, isn’t “tracking your site traffic.” That is a simple datum, and it doesn’t tell you anything about your site or your site traffic. The importance of tracking your site traffic lies in the fact that proper web traffic analytics will help you answer these key questions:

Am I reaching my target market?

If you went about developing your web site systematically, you probably spent time researching and defining your target market. You then designed your site to reach those specific people. But all your research was still - at its base - a hypothesis. You made assumptions about how to reach your customer base. Tracking your site traffic will verify what is actually happening on your site (who is coming and what they are doing), compared to what you expected to happen.

How are people interacting with my site?

Sure, people are coming to your web site. But what are they doing there? Do they hit the home page and leave? Do they go immediately to your free section and never browse your sale items? Do 90% of the people who click on your online payment form subsequently abandon it? Tracking your site traffic will allow you to see how people proceed through your site, where they spend their time, what they do, and any problems they may be encountering. And that information can help you significantly improve their user experience - and your sales.

Where is my site traffic coming from?

To drive traffic to your site, you are likely engaged in multiple marketing efforts. You may have search engine optimized your content, engaged in article marketing, and developed reciprocal links from key partners. You may be involved in a pay-per-click campaign. Perhaps you also explored email marketing or print advertising.

Web traffic analytics will tell you exactly how successful each and every one of those marketing efforts is. You will then be able to cut the fat from your marketing plan and focus on the most strategic and productive campaigns.

What trends do I see?

The web is a constantly changing place. What worked last year may not work this year. You can’t rely on the mantra “we’ve always done it this way” and expect to see consistently positive results for years on end. By tracking your site traffic, you will be able to see trends as they unfold: trends in who is coming to your site, how they are interacting with it, what they want, how they buy, etc. You will be able to respond proactively to changing patterns, rather than reactively scrambling to fix a situation after it has become a major problem. If you are serious about using your web site as a tool for business, tracking your site traffic is an absolute essential. The questions above just scratch the surface of what web traffic analytics can do for you. But the bottom line is this: tracking your site traffic provides you with quantifiable data to allow you to make wise decisions for your business.

Author: Julie Friedman

Following these simple tips will definitely boost your traffic and search engine rankings for free.

1. Make sure your site is not under construction, incomplete, with little or no unique content.
2. When your site is ready, submit it to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com. Consider also submitting to other search engine but most of them are powered by these four leading search engines. Submit also your site to reputable high PR web directories, open directories, yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, etc.
3. Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com (sitemap for search engines usually in XML format)
4. Offer sitemap to your site visitors for easy page navigation. (sitemap for visitors in HTML format)
5. Create unique and rich content sites. Avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but same content.
6. Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keywords stuffing.
7. Use text instead of images in your content, links and important subjects.
8. Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords.
9. Title tag should be 60-80 characters maximum length.
10. Meta tag description should be 160-180 characters including spaces. (about 25-30 words)
11. Meta Tag keywords must be 15-20 words maximum.
12. Optimize Pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site’s primary keywords.
13. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.
14. If your site contains dynamic pages(i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engines’ spiders having difficulty indexing dynamic pages.
15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as link farm by search engines.
16. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site. (http://lynx.isc.org/)
17. Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.
18. Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.
19. Use Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders in indexing your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. But with bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn more about Robots.txt file.
20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.
21. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engines ranking.
22. Avoid links to bad neighborhood such as web spammers, link farms, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, porn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affects your search engine rankings.
23. Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.
24. Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings and other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as spam.
25. Do not use hidden text and links. Show to search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affect your site’s reputation.
26. Do not attempt to create pages that contains phishing, scam, viruses, trojans, backdoors, spyware, adware and other malicious programs.
27. Make your site useful and informative.
28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site’s visibility, popularity and rankings. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.
29. Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.
30. Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some uses illegal and questionable ways to improve rankings.
31. Do not buy or sell links.
32. Do not create sites that contains purely affiliate links and no valuable content that are useful to the users.

I hope these tips will add more popularity and visibility to your site. Enjoy!

Author: Edwin Reyes

Every website needs more traffic. This traffic needs to be as targeted as possible to the site you are promoting, whether it is your own web site or an affiliate program. This is the lifeblood of the business. No traffic - No business, More traffic - More sales

The question is - How do you get this highly targeted web site traffic.

I will list some of the most popular methods.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Of all the pay per click search engines, Google Adwords is the largest and most popular.

This method, when done correctly, will increase your exposure, and give fast results. You must keep up to date with Google’s rules, so be sure to read them. You pay a one off fee when you register and set up your campaign. You can have your campaign up and running in minutes. There is a minimum bid, but of course you will have to pay more than this. But the beauty of Adwords is you can set a daily budget of how much you are willing to spend.

You can create as many campaigns as you want, and then test your ads (changing the headline for example).

Google provide tools to help you with your campaigns, and have exellent tutorials that walk you through everything from signing up to creating your Adwords campaigns.

Link popularity

This is achieved when other sites have links to your site. If a high traffic site has links, the search engines perceive both sites must be popular. The important thing is to have quality web sites linking back to your site.

Why should anyone want to link to your site? If you have quality content, this adds perceived value and makes your site popular, so others will want to link to you.The type of content could be:

Free downloads
Free reports, articles, ezine or newsletter
Video
Links to other good sites

Reciprocal Links

This is where you exchange links with other quality sites. You can create a links page on your site. This create a resource that visitors will want to return to. Find quality (there’s that word again) web sites related to your subject and contact the webmaster about exchanging links.

Ezine advertising

Most ezines accept advertising. Ezines are online or email newsletters. They are used to build a relationship between a webmaster and a web site visitor, with news, updates, special offers etc. But as always they should have quality content. You place an ad in ezines that are highly targeted towards your niche. Prices depend on the ezine, and also the position of the ad. The most expensive is the solo ad, where yours is the only ad.

Article Submissions

Submitting articles is a great way to build back links and web site visitors. Your articles can become ‘viral’ when others want to re-publish them on their sites, or use them in their newsletters and ezines. You include links to your site in the author resource box offering more free information. The resource box is your chance to convince the reader to visit your web site.

Two of the most popular places to post your articles are http://www.goarticles.com/ and http://www.EzineArticles.com.

Forum Posting

In order to be successful using forums there are some things that are required. Do Your Homework: Prior to joining any forum, you must do some research. Join relevant forums that are in some way related to the promotion’s primary sales market. Choose popular forums. There is no point in wasting your time and energy on forums that few members and few posts. Page raking and the amount of active members are two good ways to check for this. Choose forums that allow sig tags. Read the rules before joining and pay attention to them.

You’ve Joined: now what?

Keep your sig tag short and update it regularly. The ideal thing is to limit yourself to one link, preferably to your main website. Never create posts that are nothing more than an advertisement. This is a universal rule. At best this kind of post will be deleted by the monitors, at worst, you will be banned. Be an active member on the forum. Plan to spend at least an hour each day there. Get to know the users. Iintroduce yourself with intelligent questions depending upon the forum’s topic.

Use Your Sig file to the best advantage and within the rules. Some Forums have places where you can advertise and give special deals to members.

Social Bookmarking

In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are both accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

Social Bookmarking can bring immediate traffic to your website, as web 2.0 community websites such as Technorati, Digg, Reddit and Tailrank provide almost immediate information on various topics. These type of Bookmarking sites index and categorize content usually faster than the major search engines. People looking for the latest information on certain topics usually refer to these types of services.

Bookmarking Accounts to check out:

http://digg.com/
http://technorati.com/

You can increase your Bookmarking using the free submission site http://www.OnlyWire.com to bookmark many accounts at once. When you signup to OnlyWire.com you can use many bookmark accounts and with one simple procedure bookmark your blog post to all your accounts at once.

OnlyWire.com interfaces with:

Backflip
Bibsonomy
Blinklist
Blogmemes
Blue Dot
de.lirio.us
del.icio.us
Diigo
Furl
Jots
Linkroll
Looklater
ma.gnolia
Markaboo
Rawsugar
Shadows
Simpy
Spurl
Wink

If you don’t have a Bookmark Account for the ones listed go and sign up.

Viral Traffic using free reports - ebooks etc.

Directory Submissions

Submit your website url’s to the search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization, (SEO), is making web pages attractive to the search engines. The better optimized your web page is, the higher a ranking it will achieve in the search engines. Most people searching the internet only look at the first couple of search results.

So optimizing for the search engines focuses on techniques such as making sure that each web page is using the appropriate title tags and meta tags, and that the keyword or key phrases for the particular pages are distributed throughout the content. Search engines find and catalog web pages using spidering software.

These are just a few ways to get more web site traffic.

Author: John Leigh

Hubspot.com offers a variety of website utilities to rate your site for Internet Marketing purposes. One of their best utilities is http://website.grader.com/. We are proud that our latest website - www.nlpsa.com gets rated 92/100.

“Tagging” or “Folksonomies’ are a new powerful consumer phenomenon that help consuemers to organize their experience of online life. Not only can consumers create groups of documents based on their type, but they are also able to share their experience with other.

Just as an exmample sombody could take photographs of their pet dog and upload them to Blogger. Dependng on the settings this picture will be visisble either to everybody or just to the individual user. By tagging the picture as “dog” everybody in the wider community will be able to quickly find and identify the picture. Some photo sharing communities have many thousands of photographs available.

Tagging is a natural way to search because the results that you receive have been human edited. Even the most sophisticated search engine algorithms struggle to properly identify the semantic content of text. By allowing users to tag content small and large sites alike are making their content easier to locate, better structured, and more relevant to their users.

From a marketing perspective tags are an important way to reach consumers. Even though they may not always be accurate the truth is that many people on a website will use them to quickly find content that they are looking for. An internet marketer may want to subscribe to RSS feeds or watch social bookmarking sites to see what people are tagging. By seeing what tags are popular the internet marketer can develop content based on the current zeitgeist of the internet. Of course any marketer should be honest and ethical and avoid spamming social service.

Social Bookmarking is about sharing

Social bookmarketing is no new topic in search engine optimization but is starting to attract increasing amounts of attention.  Generating traffic is always a problem for any webmaster and anything that promises to develop meaningful traffic is something worth investigating.

But what is social bookmarking?  Well on your browser you’re probably got a “bookmarks” or “favourites” function that allows you to save certain websites that you intend on revisiting in the future.  Maybe you like to catch up with news, or need to do internet banking, but there are probably a few websites that you like to repeatedly visit.  Of course only somebody with access to your computer will be able to see these bookmarks.

Social bookmarking gives you the opportunity to share your favourite websites on the internet.  Instead of storing your bookmarks in your browser you store them online and allow other people to view them.  By becoming a member of a community of people who bookmark online you are able to discover websites that other people enjoy.  This is an effective way of weeding out websites that nobody really likes.

There are many hundreds of social bookmarking services available on the internet.  Some of the more popular ones are Digg, Delicious, and Furl.

What does this mean for a Cape Town web development team?  Well, there is a standing joke that if you get onto the front page of Slashdot or Digg then you can expect your webserver to fall over because of the huge amount of traffic that comes your way.  Even though raw traffic isn’t really a terribly important metric in SEO having so much of it that you can scarcely cope with the volume is a Good Thing.

Social media has been regarded as a way to get backlinks.  This has lead to a great amount of spam being generated on these sites by webmasters trying to promote their own websites.  Many of the social bookmarking sites no longer give search engine credit to submissions until they reach some sort of threshold.  Search engines will automatically discount the value of links coming from social bookmarking sites that are spammed heavily.  The only really good sort of link is one where a human adds a link to your content because she thinks it is genuinely valuable.

Another way to use social bookmarking could be to check if your users are adding your content to their bookmarks.  The aim of any website should be to make itself as valuable as possible to its users.  One measure of success in this regard could be to see how many times your users bookmark your site.  If nobody is bookmarking your site then it might be likely that your content is not meeting the needs of your users.

~Andy

Web Spider - friend of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A content management system (abbreviated as CMS) is a great way to manage a website, regardless of its size.  Even a very small website can benefit from the power offered by CMS.  One problem that many CMS programs face is in producing content that is friendly to search engines.  One might say that having a good content management system enables you to have a big site, but unless it is easily crawled and optimized for search engines it is not likely to be successful.  Perhaps two of the biggest problems that CMS faces are generating unique keywords for each page and in creating “search engine friendly” urls.

If you do some reading on the internet you’ll find that Joomla is often thought of as being a “SEO friendly” content management sytem.  It might not do everything for SEO right out of the box but there are many extensions that you can easily install which will improve your search engine rankings.  These will help you to overcome most of the shortcomings usually associated with using a powerful CMS.

The current trend in search engine optimization (SEO) appears to be focusing less on small technical details of the page and more on assessing the true value of your site to a visitor.  Rather than hassling with small details like META tags it seems more prudent to create a site that provides excellent value to visitors.  Search engines will reward you with visitors - since their business model depends on their ability to provide meaningful information to their users.

What does this mean to people using a content management system and wanting to optimize their website for search engines?

Well firstly, try to remember that content is king.  If you have a large amount of relevant content on your site you’ll generate authority for your site.  You’ll also start to take advantage of the “long tail” of search.  If you look at the sites that attract many thousands of visitors, enjoy high search engine rankings, and are profitable you’ll notice that they have a lot of useful content (not spam, not repetition, but proper useful content).

Secondly build pages thinking of what your user wants rather than what is “right” for SEO.  The search engines change their algorithms from time to time as they constantly try to weed out the search engine optimization techniques that are a distortion of their central business model.

Thirdly make your site as easy to crawl by search engines as possible.  Sure you’ve got great content, but make sure that it’s easily accessible.  This means that you should create a Google and Yahoo! formatted sitemap.  Some people argue that if you need a sitemap then there is something wrong with your navigation structure.  They’re probably right - but there is no harm in helping search engines find your content.

One metric that I’m always interested in is the bounce rate of my websites.  I don’t like to see visitors coming to my site and then immediately leaving (neither do the search engines incidentally) because it means that somehow my website didn’t serve their interest.  This could mean either that my description in the organic search results was inaccurate or that my advert text in a PPC campaign needs to be adjusted.  The cold realization is that if my visitors don’t like my site then search engines will stop sending them to me.  It is very important (in my opinion) to follow the paths users take through the site to ensure that they can find the information they’re looking for rather than having them just bounce away.

So when building a CMS that is optimized for search engines it is important to ensure that you are able to pay attention to the few “on page” factors that matter as well as the points raised above.  Luckily Joomla has a wide ecosystem of developers who have provided many extensions that will help you to accomplish this goal.

~Andy

Traffic exchange programs are those websites which promise to bring visitors to your website in exchange for you visiting the websites of other members of the exchange.  In other words, for every X websites you visit you will be rewarded with a number of people being directed to your site.

This is touted as a great way to generate traffic to your website - and no doubt it does.  When we experimented with a traffic exchange program we very quickly increased the number of visitors to our site by about 20 or 30 per day.  Of course this is just a drop in the ocean and hardly worth the time it took to manually click through a few websites.

Furthermore, one wonders if the quality of the traffic is such that it is even worth pursuing.  It seems likely that the majority of people visiting your site are only doing so to get a “credit” towards directing a visitor to their site.  Such visitors are hardly likely to convert on your website and are just generating meaningless hits on your site.

It doesn’t matter if your website gets a million hits every day if none of the visitors are taking the time to even look at your content.

So at the end of the day it seems that although traffic exchange programs will increase your traffic (marginally) there is unlikely to be any real financial gain from this traffic.  Your SEO efforts would be better spent in drawing visitors to your site who are interested in what you have to offer than bribing people to click your link.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) brings you to the world

Part of our search engine optimization service involves developing “backlinks” for our clients. A “backlink” is simply another website that links to you and loosely speaking the more of these that you have the better.

It’s important to remember that not all backlinks are of equal value. There are some websites that are designed specifically to provide links (sometimes for a fee!) to other websites. The value of links from these directory websites is very small and you could even be penalized if Google discovers you are purchasing links.

In fact the very best links are those that come from websites with content that is relevant to your own, that have relatively few links on the page that links to you, and that themselves have many relevant sites linking to them. Finding these websites is an art in itself and is a large part of any search engine optimization campaign.

One way in which you can start looking for relevant sites is to approach your business partners. Your suppliers and customers may well be willing to link to your website - afterall your content is relevant to them and will probably be of use to their clients. Search engine optimization is very much a user-orientated function, and not just a "bag of tricks" to try and manipulate search engines.

So called "reciprocal links" involve a quid pro quo approach to their search engine optimization strategy. It is generally thought that reciprocal links have less power than one-way links. Afterall, the search engine can see that the only reason they are linking to you is because they’re getting something in return.

Wobble Internet Productions is experienced in all aspects of search engine optimization and would love the opportunity to quote on your project. Please call us on +27 (0)21 551 6676 today!