Website Traffic: Getting The Right Visitors

People talk incessantly about - gaining more website traffic - but they rarely mention that a site really needs targeted website traffic. The only way to have a successful site is to court targeted website traffic — or people who keep coming back to your site, visiting one page after another.

Your site might be pretty and interesting, but the information is useless unless the information is useful to the person reading it. For example: when you browse a book at Amazon.com, you see a list of other books people have bought in that same category. From that list, you might decide to buy again — you’ve just been targeted.

Now, targeted website traffic doesn’t mean guaranteed traffic — just a strong possibility of more website traffic. You don’t want to lure anyone and everyone to your site. Internet loiterers take up space.

Randomly luring people is the difference between displaying magazines for people to leaf through or snagging a loyal customer who returns to buy each month.

The starting point for building traffic is to look at the keywords that you’re using on your site and then see what keywords visitors are using to search. Words are the starting point for any internet search. If someone wanted to find soft dice they could hang from the rear view mirro in their car then they will type related words into a search engine.

This is where psychology comes into play. Do they type in -fuzzy dice,- -car dice,- -hanging dice,- -rearview mirror dice,- -fuzzy car dice,- or none of the above? What if they can’t spell right and type -fuzy dice-? What if they don’t know whether -rearview- is supposed to be one word or two? You want the money from the -rear view mirror dice- people just as much as you want the others. Keywords are all about improving your odds.

To both maximise your web traffic and build even more you need to have other items that your fuzzy dice seeking consumer is also likely to be interested in. In order to do this, you need to know more about your customers. Are they male or female? Under 25 or over 40? Perhaps a car accessory site is the best fit. Or maybe an unusual gift type site is a better mix. Without understanding the interests of your likely web visitors, its difficult to get your pitch right.

Getting people to visit your site and buy what you’re selling is similar to playing the stock market: You can make some educated guesses, but it’s all a risk and a gamble. That doesn’t mean you should ignore trying to improve your odds, though — targeted website traffic will definitely help. When you tempt people who want what you have, they’ll buy.