Archive for the 'Web Traffic' Category

A few days back I got quite a shock to see that traffic to one of my sites dropped by more than 20%. Image by nailbender.

Usually traffic on Thursdays and Fridays are the best days but not on 1st April 2010.

This downtrend worries me because when traffic goes down, so too is our earnings / income.

I started to panic and got worried that maybe Google has decided to stop sending traffic to my site, or maybe I’ve done something wrong and got a penalty.

At times like this, it’s really important to look at information that we have from different perspectives.

First thing to look at is stats from Google Analytics and under Intelligence, this is what I saw.

Notice how on April 1, 2010, the traffic dropped to near weekend stats, something very unusual. Continue Reading »
Web site traffic drop by more than 20 percent since 1 April 2010

Today’s big question is, do you know where you website visitors and traffic are coming from?

In case you’re wondering why is it important to know, well it’s really simple. Imagine if you’re an owner of a music CD store. Would you be interested to find out what sort of music your customers are most interested in? There’s no harm in knowing a little more about the people who walk into your store.

Same goes for your website. What are your web visitors looking for when they reach your site. Do your website have the information that they are looking for? Maybe yes, maybe no. But in order to find out, you firstly need to be able to track where your site visitors are coming from. These are some common questions:

• Which country do they come from?
• What did they search for in order to reach your site?
• How many visitors are currently surfing your site?
• How long did the spend surfing the pages on your site?
• How did they reach the site? Via search engine or email recommendations?

These are some common questions that a website stats tracker can help to answer.

But you may ask, even with answer to the above, what can I do with it?

I will provide one example – from my own experience. Continue Reading »
Where are my web site visitors and traffic coming from?

This is actually a spin off of something I posted on a forum online. Someone had started a thread regarding looking for other ways to get traffic other than Google. They were frustrated with Google’s constant changes and loosing their high rankings.
 
Here’s an enhanced version with a little more detail for your benefit:

If you want to start competing with other search engines, I would probably start hanging out in other search engine areas in the forum and start asking questions. There is more to life than Google. I would HIGHLY recommend that no one puts all of their advertising in that one place. Just one Google Change could bring your whole business crashing to the ground.
 
You could also ask some questions about Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. This is a way to get targeted traffic from the Search Engines. Google Adwords is one that I concentrate on. You only pay when someone clicks your ad.

There are a lot of different ways to get traffic besides Google. A couple more might be: Continue Reading »
Something about Google’s constant algorithm change

The following are some ways to get repeat web traffic to your site 

• Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.
• Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.
• Allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.
• Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.
• Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.
• Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.
• Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.
• Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.
• Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.
• Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.