Website Traffic Improvement

People have websites because they have information they wish to share with other people. Thus it becomes a disappointment when one’s website does not get visited.

What could be the reason why a website may not get visits or hits? This happens when a website does not rank high. A website ranks high when it ranks on top of other websites for searches made. If you are searching for something like Mt. Kilimanjaro, for instance, there could be millions of websites with the same information. The sites are listed so that the higher ranking websites appear on top of the list. Since the person making the search usually concerns himself with the few sites that appear on top, those below fail to get the visits.

High ranking websites are usually those with enough internal or inbound links form other websites. That is, they have enough links that point to them from other websites. One way of creating inbound links is by link exchange where you create a link for somebody on your website in return for a similar favor from his own website. Another way is to visit a website and leave a comment, your name and your link in the guess book of that website. I have tried this but discovered it is more cumbersome than a third method that I have come to embrace. There are sites I visit, waste my online time and discover that they have no guess book. Secondly I don’t enjoy spending my time to find sites with which we could exchange links. There are usually conditions that I don’t always like. This third option that I have come to like is the use of article syndication.

In article syndication, you write an article and send it to a website that publishes it and then add your name and a link to your website. There are many websites whose job is to receive articles from authors around the world and publish them. Your reward is the link they create for you. I have used www.selfgrowth.com only once. My traditional site for article syndication however, is www.ezinearticles.com On ezinearticles, someone could copy your article and publish it on his own site. I have an article about the significance of commercial motorbikes in Nigeria. Two organizations, one engaged in motorcycle racing and the other selling motorcycle parts have all copied this article to their own websites and created a link, for me, each. Thus for one story, I got three links.

Another way I attract articles to my site is to write unique stories. I have discovered that certain information about my locality can only be made available online by our own people. Since there aren’t many people here who post certain information about the locality, I find myself enjoying unique traffic by posting that information that few or no websites have.

With all other things been equal, a page on which the phrase “area boys” appears more frequently will pop up at the top of pages on which it appears less frequently. Thus the more a word appears on a page, the more it is going to attract traffic than other pages on which the word appears less frequently.

Keywords are also very important in attracting traffic to a site. You can look at a keyword as a word that helps the search engine to direct people to a website. If I write an article about Engineer Buba Galadima, I can add those three words “engineer, buba and galadima” as keywords. By this, I am telling the search engine that it can direct people searching for “Engineer Buba Galadima” to my website.

The way you write the title of your stories also matters. My story can have the title “Buba Galadima and Political Opposition.” I can also decide to rephrase my title thus: “Political Opposition as seen in Buba Galadima.” If somebody is searching for “Buba Galadima,” the search engine will bring the page with the first title on top. This is because search engines mostly look at the first few words in a title.

You can monitor the number of persons visiting your website by adding a hit counter that tells you how many people have visited the site. You can also sign in to Google Adsense. With Google Adsense, I am able to know how many people visited my website but also from which part of the world they came from. In addition to that, I am also able to know what they were searching for (keywords) when the search engine directed them to my site. Through this I am able to know what information people are looking for. For instance, Martins Kuye could be mentioned on a webpage in connection with a visit to Kenya. People looking for the biography of Martins Kuye could be directed to that page because the name “Martins Kuye” is mentioned. If you see many keywords about the biography of Martins Kuye, then it means that people are more interested in the biography Martins Kuye than anything else. You can write this biography and enjoy the traffic.