Web traffic: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia

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===Increase web site traffic===

Web traffic can be increased by placement of a site in [[Web search engines|search engines]] and purchase of [[advertising]], including bulk e-mail, [[pop-up ads]], and in-page advertisements. Web traffic can also be increased by purchasing through web traffic providers or non-internet based advertising.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.buysitetraffic.com/post/how-to-buy-traffic-how-to-get-targeted-visitors-paid-traffic-tips-25.html|title=How To Buy Traffic to Your Website|publisher=BuySiteTraffic|accessdate=28 May 2012}}</ref>

If a web page is not listed in the first pages of any search, the odds of someone finding it diminishes greatly (especially if there is other competition on the first page). Very few people go past the first page, and the percentage that go to subsequent pages is substantially lower. Consequently, getting proper placement on search engines is as important as the web site itself.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.fulltraffic.net/blog/84367/how-to-drive-traffic-to-your-website/|title=How to Drive Traffic to Your Website|publisher=FullTraffic|accessdate=9 October 2011}}</ref>

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In most cases the best way to increase web traffic is to register it with the major search engines. Just registering does not guarantee traffic, as search engines work by "crawling" registered web sites. These [[Web crawler|crawling programs]] (crawlers) are also known as "spiders" or "robots". Crawlers start at the registered home page, and usually follow the hyperlinks it finds, to get to pages inside the web site (internal links). Crawlers start gathering information about those pages and storing it and indexing it in the search engine database. In every case, they index the page [[Uniform Resource Locator|URL]] and the page title. In most cases they also index the web page header (meta tag) and a certain amount of the text of the page. Then, when a search engine user looks for a particular word or phrase, the search engine looks into the database and produces the results, usually sorted by relevance according to the search engine algorithms.

Usually, the top organic result gets most of the clicks from web users. According to recent studies from the [[AOL search data leak]], the first listing gets approximately 42% of clicks, while the number ten listing gets approximately 3% of the total clicks.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://thewebtrafficwizard.com/do-you-want-a-top-10-google-ranking/|title=Leaked AOL Data Reveals Impact of Top 10 Rankings on CTR|publisher=TheWebTrafficWizard|accessdate=6 April 2012}}</ref> The differences in web traffic generated can be staggering depending on how many searches per month your keyword generates. This indicates that it is important to appear in the top results. There are some companies which specialize in search engine marketing. However, it is becoming common for webmasters to get approached by "boiler-room" companies with no real knowledge of how to get results. As opposed to pay-per-click, search engine marketing is usually paid monthly or annually, and most search engine companies cannot promise specific results for what is paid to them.

Because of the huge amount of information available on the web, crawlers might take days, weeks or months to complete review and index all the pages they find. Google, for example, as of the end of 2004 had indexed over eight billion pages. Even having hundreds or thousands of servers working on the spidering of pages, a complete re-indexingreindexing takes its time. That is why some pages recently updated in certain web sites are not immediately found when doing searches on search engines.

==Traffic overload==<!-- This section is linked from [[Slashdot effect]] -->