Increased traffic on a website lends the site and its content an air of respectability which often places it higher in search query rankings, which makes it more visible, further increasing traffic and lending the site even more credibility. Increasing a website’s traffic is an ever-escalating spiral of increased readership (traffic) and trustworthiness that starts with choosing the right content to meet the needs of an intended audience, and then going out and helping that audience find the site using optimization and other techniques.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Internet Publishers
On the content development side of the equation, web publishers commonly employ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to increase the traffic to a particular site in the hopes of attracting more users, and ultimately more advertisers. By inserting specific words and phrases that stand out and are likely to attract users interested in a given topic, site developers are more likely to rise to the top of the search lists when those keywords and phrases are searched for on various search engines.
But optimization calls for much more than just keyword rich content. When starting a website, attention should be paid to each of the following areas:
Titles – Unique and content specific titles should be written for each and every page of content.
Descriptions – Meta (head) tag descriptions should be written using relevant, detailed, and specific key words and phrases.
URLs – When organizing site root structure, some thought should be given to the URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) that will ultimately be constructed from that file system. File names filled with numbers an abbreviations will generate URL filled with incomprehensible code. However, files with content specific names will aid users in finding and appreciating the content at those URLs.
Navigation – Like URLs, thought should be given to the navigation structure of a site and how links generated from that navigation system will be viewed by users. Files and hierarchies should be developed with an eye toward user experience and not programmer comfort.
Images – Images file names, captions, and image descriptions (meta tags) should be drafted with an eye toward optimization and maximizing the use of specific, accurate, detailed keywords and phrases.
Content – The most powerful form of optimization is the generation of high quality, evocative, detailed, and targeted written content.
For web publisher’s looking for further reading on optimization techniques, Google’s Webmaster Help Forum is a valuable resource where new web publishers can ask questions and tap into a vast knowledge base relating to optimization and analysis.
Website Traffic Analysis
As with all advertising, fee structures, and revenue generation for web advertising are calculated based on traffic and volume as defined by users/visitors, page views, and hits. The greater the traffic to a website, the higher the cost to the advertiser, the greater the advertising fees taken in, and the greater the revenue paid to the site owner/publisher. So it’s critical for site owners/publishers to know and understand the traffic volumes, sources, and patterns related to their site. This understanding is key to finding ways to maximize traffic to the site in question, and it all begins with Traffic Analysis.
While several companies do offer site traffic analysis, the gold standard is Google Analytics. Because their search engine is so respected, and they’ve managed to define much of the terminology and metrics in this arena, Google Analytics has developed a comprehensive suite of web traffic analysis tools that are recognized and understood by most web advertisers.
Internet advertisers are going to want to know how many unique visitors, page views, and hits a web page receives, and how many pages the average visitor views, as well as how much time they spend on the site. Any credible analysis service will provide these figures as well as a host of other website statistics including, but not limited to, visitor location, and how those visitors found their way to the site, whether it was through a search engine (and what they searched for on the engine), or through a direct inbound link.
Website Ranking for Internet Publishers
Another way that Internet advertisers assess the potential for a particular site to find their target audience is through rankings, and ranking services. As opposed to analysis services which register traffic volume and related figures, ranking services, like Alexa, compare websites to one another based on traffic figures as well as number of sites that link to a particular site (trust and authoritativeness), and compare them to sites with similar content and focus.
Because understanding a website’s traffic patterns, and developing techniques to increase that traffic lie at the heart of most web publishing endeavors, traffic analysis and optimization are vital components of every web publisher’s toolkit. Including, but not limited to keyword and phrase selection, URL construction, and meta tags, quality SEO based on hard analysis of a site’s traffic and comparative ranking can vastly improve the volume of traffic to that site.
Glenn Kaufmann - Having moved every four years up to the age of 12, I've always been something of a restless soul ready to take on the next big thing. I ...
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