Web Traffic Generation

Working on my recent project I came across the need to experiment with generating traffic to my site. The rationale behind the experiment was to determine whether traffic was a factor considered by various search engines when assigning rank. There are many articles on the web which purport to the fact that traffic to a site is the most important factor, but the ideas presented are often flawed as search engines (the mainstream) often publicise relevancy being the determining factor. Of course we would also have to take into account links mainly incoming but that’s a topic of a later article. Let’s focus on traffic generation by way of a simple analysis.

In all experiments the simple case is always considered from the onset, i.e. we isolate each variables and examine the output or result when a stimulus is applied. In this case we isolate traffic. The objective of the experiment is to measure traffic and also to look at methods of generating traffic.

Step 1. Build your website.

I’m assuming if anyone is reading this article they would already have a site which is live. However if you don’t, help is at hand. You can either design your web site from ‘scratch’ or you can take advantage of templates which are available from the web. I would recommend, www.DigiMisi.com where you can download 2 Gigabytes of templates in various formats: Flash, HTML and Photoshop.

Besides the presentation the content should be concise and focussed on keywords which I again I assume you would have researched.

Make sure your site is compliant to web standards. Visit The W3C Markup Validation Service for more information and validation of your code.

I think I’ll leave search engine optimisation for another article as it may detract from the topic of this article, but do not neglect the importance of a site which has been optimised for your chosen products or keywords.

Step 2. Traffic Generation.

So where do we start with this one? Well, the good old fashioned method would be to advertise in the classifieds of your local newspaper or walk around handing out flyers to the general public. Both methods have been tried and tested for years and produce results depending on when and what you are marketing. Both can be used highly effectively to create hype of an upcoming event, for example how many times have you had the urge to go out to watch a movie which has been either raved about on TV or a magazine later to find out it was the worst movie you had seen? I bet you’re also starting to wonder why I have given the above as examples since the topic is specifically devoted to web traffic generation. The answer is simple; the above is a perfect analogy to make in terms of web marketing for traffic generation. There’s no difference between paper marketing and web marketing, both can be employed to create traffic to your site. The only difference in the methods we use depends on the type and volume of traffic you want to create. Taking the case of presenting flyers to the general public, when presenting a flyer, if worded correctly can instantly leave an impression. In most occasions the flyers I get handed promote clubs and the cost of their drinks which is all fine and well around the clubbing hour but pointless 9am in the morning. Hopefully you’re starting to get the picture. More on traffic generation in the next article.