Web Traffic Secrets

The amount of data sent and received by visitors to a website is known as web traffic, which constitutes a large portion of Internet traffic. The number of visitors and the number of pages visited determine the web traffic. The incoming and outgoing traffic are monitored by the sites that find which parts or pages of the site are popular and feel the trend.

The web traffic is monitored in many ways and the data that are gathered are helpful to structure sites. The web traffic can be increased by including search engines and through search engine optimization.

The amount of traffic seen by a website shows the measure of its popularity and so can be used to see the shortcomings, if any, and concentrate on improving those areas. In this way, it is possible to increase the popularity of a web site and the number of people visiting that particular web site.

However, it is sometimes imperative to safeguard some parts of the website by a password, by which only authorized people can visit particular sections or pages. At times, based on geographical location too, specific traffic may be blocked. Depending upon the number of connections and bandwidth too, the access to a web server can be limited.

There are many ways of increasing web site traffic. Placement of a site in search engines, purchase of advertising like bulk e-mail, Pop- up ads and in-page advertisements are some of them. The increase in web traffic can also be achieved by purchasing non-Internet based advertising.

It is quite important to get proper placement on search engines because if a web page is not listed in the first pages of a search, the chances are less to find it in the subsequent pages, as most people do not have a tendency to go past the first page. The other ways of increasing web traffic are offering e books or articles and classified advertisements, web rings and building link popularity, of which the last mentioned is the easiest.

Popularity can be built by writing e-mails to sites and asking for a link. Or else, written material can be sent to e- zines or free article sites, which accept them for free. But the benefit for the writer is that it may bring traffic to the website.

Generally, web traffic can be increased by registering with the major search engines that follow the hyper links to get to pages inside the web site, index it and store in the database. When too much web traffic occurs, it slows down the access to a web site because more file requests go to the server than it can handle-which may be due to over popularity or an intentional attack on the site, which usually happens to small web sites rather than larger scale web sites.

Some definitions for beginners, they need to understand web site traffic report

Hit
A request from a web client (Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.) for a file on a web server.

File
Indicates a Hit that resulted in a successfully downloaded file. The number of Files will always be lower than the number of Hits. In a perfect world, they would be equal.

Page
A page is one complete web page, most likely composed of a number of Files. For instance, if your home page has five images and some text, there will be six Hits (and hopefully Files) that make up a single Page.

Visit
When a user visits your site, the user often clicks to a few more pages on your site. The period during which the user looks at those pages is called a Visit. And, if the user leaves your site, but comes back within a few minutes, it still usually counts as just one visit.
Note: With a little math, you can identify some interesting numbers like Pages per Visit and Files per Page.

User agent
User agent, or client, is geek-speak for a browser or other program that accesses your web site. This information can help you identify what browsers people are using to view your site, and it also identifies many search engine agents that visit your site.

Site or Host
This term is not to be confused with the a web host. Rather counter-intuitively, this term actually refers to the computers that access the web site. These are often identified by IP numbers (these look like 64.23.144.5) or the name of the computer itself. So, if you are using a computer named JOSIAH and you are logged into a domain called IMADOMAIN.COM, your computer might show up in the log file as JOSIAH.IMADOMAIN.COM. If your visitors are using proxy servers, the proxy server might show up here instead.

Search terms
Often, when someone gets to your site through a search engine result, the log file will record what words they searched for to find your site. This can be very helpful information, especially if you are trying to measure how effective certain keywords are for you.

Usernames
If you are running an Intranet, or you have a section of your site that clients log in to, the Usernames list will actually show which usernames were used to access parts of your web site. If you don’t have any such areas, this section should remain blank.

Errors
Web logs should also record errors, and these are identified by different number codes. We have all seen the 404 Error, File Not Found on some web sites we’ve tried to get to. That information is in the log as well. And, yes, if you have too many of these, you should be concerned.