More traffic to your site

If you don't yet have a web site for your business, there are many articles here that can help you. I recommend starting with Websites for the self employed: part 2, content and Websites for the self employed: part 1, creating your site.

Maybe your web site is important to your business or maybe it's just your personal soap box. Either way, you'd like more visitors. As I've said over and over again, the answer to the problem of low visitation is content, content, and content, in that order, and with particular stress on "content".

You can't bulid large volumes of content instantly, but that doesn't mean you can't work at it steadily. I have around 12,000 articles and postings here, and we both know it took a lot of years to reach this volume. But if you aren't working at it; if you are not steadily adding new content, you'll rather obviously never grow.

People want new subject matter. If you are a regular visitor to this site, surely one of the reasons is that you know you will always find something new. Today's article may not interest you, but perhaps the next one will. If there were not a constant flow of new posts, you probably would return rarely or not at all: new content builds readership.

New content also impresses search engines. The more you write about any subject, the more Google and other search engines will see you as an authority in that area and the more traffic they will send you. Part of that is just sheer quantity, but regularity and freshness also increase their respect for your content.

Volume is important, but layout, subject matter and writing style also matter. Most important is that you need to measure performance: you can't tell if you are doing the right things if you aren't measuring.

You should be counting page visits. You may not want to do so overtly as we do here (a counter on each page), but the individual popularity of pages is critical information that you need to track. You can get it from your web server logs after the fact or track it on the fly as I do here, but you need to know what pages attract more readers.

You also need to know how your site is being ranked overall. Google page rank, Netcraft, Technorati and Alexa are the main indicators I pay attention to, but you can track more at Urltrends. Don't give too much importance to any one tool: for example, Alexa and Netcraft only know about visitors who use their toolbars. When you only have a few visitors, an unusual circumstance such as all of them happening to be Alexa users can cause inaccurate results. Especially when your traffic is still light, judge by the overall picture rather than individual indicators.

Google Analytics is a free service that can really help you track and analyze site performance. If you have something to sell (and services count) you can drive traffic to your site with Google Adwords and Google Analytics automatically helps you track that performance. This is free; it's just a bit of Javascript you add to each page on your site. Once that's in place, Google Analytics can tell you such things as how long visitors remain on your pages, how many other pages they visit and much, much more.

Once you have at least steady traffic, you can start experimenting with layout, color, subject matter and so on. Do short, tight paragraphs work better for your readers or do they prefer long expositions? It's usually the former, but it does depend on your audience: writing for academics, medical professionals and scientists requires an entirely different style than writing for a more general audience. If you aren't sure, experimentation can help you determine what works best for you.

If you aren't measuring, you are flying blind. Know where you are, and whether you are improving or falling behind. Don't guess, don't assume: measure and analyze.

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