step 4 – generating traffic

How to generate traffic for websites? Wait, what is a traffic?

Traffic here may convey two meanings – page visits and hits. Page visits are the volume of entities visiting one particular page from your website or blog. Visit counts may be either unique visits or returning visits. You may have, say, an overall visits of 150 for your homepage, but you may get only 30 unique visits out of the 150. This means that only 30 ‘visitors’ visit your page over a certain period of time and the remaining 120 visits are not new visits.

Does having little amount of unique page visitors show a negative analysis?

Not really. Well, it is obvious that, using the above example, 30 page visitors is of small amount. Too small. However, looking at the amount of returning visits, it is quite huge. Rather, it is extremely huge – 120. This means that your website really has what it takes to make people to revisit it. Good job!

Now that we know what is page visits. Remember, traffic may also refer to the amount of hits. Some people may say that hits are not the accurate way to measure traffic. This is true.

Whenever we visit a website, the things that we see are all downloaded to our browser. One “hit” means one file downloaded (even if you do not technically or literally DOWNLOAD anything, say by pressing a download button). When someone visited a page that contains 30 graphics on it, the visit counts as 31 hits. One page downloaded with an addition of 30 graphics. So now you know why hits are a useless way to measure traffic, compared to page visits.

Among other things, these are some of the essential things that you will need to know in order to generate traffic, in other words, getting more and more visitors:

a) Maximise the usage of social medias – Twitter can get you so many followers just in several days. Guide your followers with links to your website. On your facebook, make sure you create a Page for your website. The 140 character limit on Twitter can be compensated by the Facebook page. So make use of both of these two kings of social medias. Of course all other social media options are available too.


b) They say that content is king. Always the king. Yes, this is so true. How do you expect to get visitors when you have nothing to offer them? Talking about offering, be sure that you also have some freebies stuff on your website to appeal to new visitors and keep them coming back, such as Newsletters, etc.

c) Make use of YouTube! Many great websites now have at least one Youtube account, providing many useful videos for the public. When the public views the videos, provided that you put up the backlink to your website/blog, they will definitely go to your site to learn more.

d) Submit your content to search engines. For Google, Go here! For Yahoo, Go Here! (it will direct you to your YahooMail login page first, fill in the details, log in and you’ll be redirected to the desired page). For Bing, Go Here! (you will need a WindowsLive ID, if you do not have one, follow their directions). To submit to the other search engines, check all the available pages here!

e) Submit your website or blog to Directories.

f) Submit your website or blog to Open Source projects.

g) Participate in any forums that have discussions about things that include what your website or blog focuses into.

h) Engage in websites that accumulates people asking for help, such as Yahoo Answers or any such site.

i) Make sure your website or blog contain words that are used frequently under your site’s theme. These are called keywords.

(We will provide you with a tutorial on how to use Google Adword Keyword Tools soon! Make sure you subscribe to our posts by bookmarking AND following us on Twitter)

As you go along, you will find more things to learn in order to generate traffic. Do not expect your website or blog to have enormous visits for the first two to three months. Remember this: PATIENCE IS KEY, CONTENT IS KING! NETWORKING IS QUEEN!

(Don’t forget to keep up to date as we will soon be talking about Generating Traffic offline!)