Traffic is a very critical key performance indicators of a website like the sales figure of a typical sales person. What is web traffic? Well, it is calculated on a per unique visit by a Internet user. There are basically 3 types of visits: unique, returned and reload. As far as page impression is concerned, the mechanism will only be interested visits from unique Internet Protocol (IP) address.
Why is it important to generate traffic to your site?
If your site is dealing with selling of products or services, more visitors mean more chance for your products or services to be sold. It works the same way as a shop. Which shop do you think you make the most money when you have one shop with little visitors and another full of visitors? Well, that is very obvious, isn't it. More traffic to your site also means more passive income by means of affiliation and advertisements. Advertisements like Google Adsense pays the webmaster money on a per click and 1000 per page impressions or also known as CPM. Extra passive income while hosting a site. More traffic generally means more revenue.
Source of traffic
Generally speaking, the sources of traffic are search engines, link exchange, advertisement and forums. However, the most critical source of all that you need to pay your maximum attention on would be the search engine. Then that will raise the next question: How to you use the search engine to increase your traffic?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is a technique in which the user deployed to increase the level of search engines friendliness. The higher the page rank, the higher it will shows during a search on the certain relevant key words by any users. The most important of all, such traffic generated is free of charge. Most people understand SEO on the face value but do not actually comprehend what are the attributes involved in this technique. So I will point out the most critical and vital key points which made up SEO.
Concept of SEO
1. The importance of Measuring Relevance and Popularity
Modern commercial search engines rely very heavily on the science of 'information retrieval' (IR). That science has been incepted and has been around ever since the middle of the 20th century, when retrieval systems generated computers in libraries, research facilities and government laboratories. Early in the development of search systems, IR experts eventually realized that two critical components made up the majority of search functionality:
Relevance - the degree to which the content of the documents returned in a search matched the Internet user's query intention and terms. The relevance of a document ultimately increases if the terms or phrase queried by the user occurs multiple times and shows up in the title of the work or in featured or important headlines, sub-headers or tags.
Popularity - the relative importance, measured via citation (the act of one work referencing another, as often occurs in academic and business documents) of a given content that matches the user's query. The popularity of a given document consequently increases with every other document with the relevant contents that references it.
Relevances and popularity were then evolved to web search 40 years later and manifested themselves in the form of document or content analysis and link analysis.
2. Understanding Document and link analysis
In document analysis, search engines compared and sieve for whether the search terms are found in important areas of the document - the title, the meta data, the heading tags and the content body. They set out to automatically measure the level of quality of the contents in the document.
In link analysis, search engines measure not only the links to the site, but also the description about this site. They also have a good comprehension on what is affiliated with what with the help of historical link data, the registration records of the site and other sources, who is worthy of being trusted like .edu and .gov pages are generally more valuable for this reason and contextual content data about the site the page is hosted on and which is the site that links to that site and what they had said about that site in terms of description.
Link and document analysis worked together and overlap hundreds of factors that can be individually measured and filtered via the search engine's algorithms, a set of instructions that tell the engines what importance to each assigned factor. The algorithm will the one that ultimately determines scoring for the documents and will subsequently links results in decreasing order of importance that forms a structured rankings.
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