Saturday, January 28, 2012

How Website Traffic Should Be Achieved

How Website Traffic Will be Achieved Should be Considered Before Anything ElseEvery web developer is concerned with the issue of website traffic. It is after all the lifeblood of e-commerce and every website's oxygen. Sadly noticeable however is many web marketers' propensity for building websites before anticipating and planning for traffic generation. It is akin to manufacturing a product without knowing how it will actually work!
Irrespective of how beautifully designed your website is, or how good your site's content, if your content does not precisely match your market's online search behavior and you have not found a way with your content to beat your competition, your website is dead in the water.
Does it make sense to attend to things like market research, your prospective customers' online behavior in terms of the search phrases they type into search engines to find your information, before you even begin with the design of your website and the writing of your content? Of course it does! Because if it is responsive and targeted traffic you want, you will build your website around the specific keywords you have identified in the search phrases people use to find your information. Moreover, you will identify within this collection of profitable keywords, a sub-set of keywords with which you can beat your competition.
Here's what you should consider and strategies to implement to strategically achieve the right website traffic:
Website Traffic and Its Relationship with SEO, Search Rankings, Website Usability and Inbound Links
The how of website traffic can be answered by researching the subject yourself and educating yourself on strategies to achieve it, or you can hire a professional company or person in the field of search engine optimization (SEO) to analyze your entire situation.
Website traffic is directly related to your website pages' ranking with the search engines. In other words, unless your pages rank high up on the search result page following an internet user's search for information related to what you're offering, your chances of achieving any level of significant and quality traffic are slim. So, the first thing you will want to achieve is the correct targeting of your market.
Remember that traffic for the sake of traffic is a futile exercise. An increase in traffic must be an increase in relevant and targeted traffic. You want people who are really interested in your offer or the information you want to share, because only those people are potential customers.
You would also need to pay close attention to the following:
Your website's usability. Assess your site's performance at all levels. How do your visitors react to it? Is it "sticky" enough? Does it navigate with ease? Are your pages loading fast enough? Can your visitors comfortably find and access the information they are looking for?
Analyze your competition and learn from other competitive but higher achieving websites in terms of keyword relevance, their search rankings, the look, feel and contents of their sites.
Needless to say that you need to correct your mistakes as you continuously analyze the relevance of your keywords and your website's functionality.
Sometimes it may even require a re-design of your website, but more often you will only need to enhance your content and perform SEO with deeper keywords analysis and optimization.
This may all sound quite complex and perhaps it is, but if you approach the tasks systematically, it is very manageable and achievable. Content is king and if your website offers quality and unique content, you have laid a solid foundation for website traffic. Moreover, build your unique content around carefully selected and targeted keywords and you are well on your way to get increased and targeted website traffic.
Website traffic must always be assessed against the bigger picture of business promotion. You promote you business to enhance sales and you would therefore want to achieve website traffic for the same purpose.
Any traffic is not good enough, in fact it's bad, and you should not be satisfied with numbers or become complacent with high website traffic when it does not convert into business prospects. I am deliberately stressing the point of quality, targeted traffic, because I see everyday how inexperienced marketers fall for so-called traffic generating systems. The Internet is awash with these dubious programs while they achieve nothing but enriching their owners and leading well meaning marketers astray.
Your focus should be on getting to know your market well and analyzing and identifying the keywords to use for search engine optimization and building links with other related and reputable businesses. When other reputable, authority websites link back to you, it increases your website's credibility in the eyes of the search engines, which translates into increased search ranking and thus increased traffic. Not only that, you will also receive direct traffic from your links on these websites.
Consequently, the answer to how website traffic should be achieved lies in unique, quality content, website usability, the effective targeting of your market through keyword research, using your identified keywords to achieve search ranking and getting back links from related, authority websites.

Andre Kalis is a career Internet marketer, author and web developer. He has intensively studied the question of how website traffic is best achieved.
You will find additional resources, tools and insights on the subject of website traffic at http://canearnonline.com

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