Herself's Webtools

By now I expect you are using Google Analytics, StatCounter or another tool to watch and see who’s coming, from where, what pages they load and why.

One of the best ways to build traffic to a website of any kind is to give your audience what they are looking to find. Especially if it is something no one else has covered. As an example, I put news stories about house plants up on the house plant site occasionally. With in a week of posting a news story I started to get lots of visitors from people looking for a specific plant. This was a plant I had only mentioned in passing. I had no information on it. It was just included in a list of plants in the news article. A quick Google search showed no one else had discussed care of this particular plant either. So I immediately hunted down pictures and information on this plant. It now gets a steady stream of visits every day.

What pages do your visitors visit most often? Are those pages as good as they could be? If not; rewrite them, redo them, do what ever is needed to make them sparkle.

What labels are your visitors using the most? Add more articles on that topic. That’s telling you either you’ve done a better job than others covering that topic or no one else has given people what they are looking to find. The net is a big place. Anything you can find that is not covered or covered well you should be all over. If you are not unique no one will find you.

If people are frequently searching for something on your website put links to those pages right on your front page. Put those sidebars to good use. No one is going to hunt around your site to find something when he/she can hit the back button to Google and hit the next search result that had been returned.

You’ll find some pages that get visited often but that no one stays to read. Take a hard look at those pages. What is missing? Are they too slow to get to the information someone desires? Are those pages not indepth enough? Or are they too indepth and the reader is looking for a quick and dirty version? Rework those pages too. The metrics for ranking websites are changing and time spend on a site is going to matter more. Also you don’t want people not finding what they want. Or the next time you come up in a search they will skip any pages from your site in the search results.

So when you go through your logs don’t just look at the body count. Put in a little time digging and you’ll find your traffic will grow.

More information:
Know who is visiting your website

Now these are figures for the top 25 blogs which may or may not differ from what traditional websites need:

Which means about each 8 links you collect inbound from various sources will get you 1 visitor a month.

But also remember popular blogs have lots of links from low traffic sites. Actual numbers of inbound links per visit are probably lower for most sites.

Source for link and visitor numbers Popular Blogs | eBizMBA

See also:
How Google Measures Link Popularity