| | understanding and using web traffic
Understanding the flow of internet traffic,
to attain website traffic - Part 1
To attain visitor traffic to your website you must understand how traffic flows throughout the internet. This understanding stems from the basic algorithm of the Internet and the goals of it's original creators. The goal of the creators was to link the knowledge of mankind together by using hyperlinks. That's it. You can be on one page of content and click a link, to be sent to another. Links point to sites or pages of similar content. The Internet grew and became what is today because of a simple basic goal, but we are leaving that basic premise by relying on search engines to move traffic to our websites. What we have today has become a quest to store all the knowledge of mankind into search engine databases. This is unnatural to the way the web is designed and should be used. Trying to store all the information in a giant database, doesn't work and never will. Results are diluted and the knowledge grows faster than robots can index it. No search engine database has indexed over 17% of the Internet and adding up all the knowledge of all the databases doesn't even equal 40%. Those numbers include 800,000,000 web pages and there are those that say, there's over 3,000,000,000 (yes, 3 billion) web pages. Why are your web pages going to have placement in the top 30 listings from search engine queries? Are your website's pages any better than the next website's?
You must be listed in the top 30 to get any traffic. For most of us, the quest for ownership of the top ten, twenty or even thirty single keywords or phrases, in the SEs, is a waste of time. I get millions of hits a month to my cyber-robotics.com website but I bet I only get three qualified visitors a day from the search engines. There are lots of websites pertaining to website marketing and I just can't compete. There are just too many. If you have a website dealing in non-competitive Themes or subjects, like Nepenthes Carnivorous Plants only grown in Borneo, then you may have a chance to corner the market in Nepenthes. But there are those of us who type our subject keywords into search engine query textboxes, and the return listing consists of 3,456,142 pages and ours is listing number 109,234. We must assume that's doing pretty good as that's still in the top 3% :-) And even if we found out what does work in the search engines, the next person copies. Plus you have probably discovered on your own, that the keyword you own for a few days in the search engines query results, doesn't give you the qualified traffic you want. Traffic flooding in today is gone tomorrow, like a switch being turned on and off, exciting but brief. We have all thought, at one time or another, that search engines were everything and without traffic from the search engines, our websites were doomed to failure. That's what we have been taught, but we have been told the world is flat.
The continuation of this article will discuss how understanding the nature of the web will help every webmaster, attain the traffic they so richly deserve.
Understanding the flow of internet traffic,
to attain website traffic - Part 2
So how do you get more than the 3 hits a day that the average website gets on the internet? You must understand links and their importance to traffic. Traffic is what feeds e-commerce, business-to-business or any Internet website for that matter and links are our signs and roadways, for visitors and robots alike, to find our sites and easily visit them. Without links, pointing to you and away from you, you are nothing.
The world is not flat, like some visionaries of old screamed. It's round, as modern day thinkers found. In the case of the internet it's multi-dimensional. Each point in space, like a planet floating in space, is virtually the same distance from each other where time and space doesn't matter, when traveling from one-to-another. That sounds like a futuristic story in another space-time continuum. Perhaps we need to use cyber-space as an explanation and use reality, as an analogy, while explaining how traffic flows through the Internet. Each website could be like a planet, a point of space in this cyber-space, not limited by time and distance. A click from one, instantly whisks you to another, similar to possible conveyances of the future, causing traffic to flow from one-to-another. The traffic from point-to-point or planet-to-planet happens along established link paths, with the larger websites, having more links pointing to them and away from them to other websites. The largest ones, like massive terminals, routing the travelers to the knowledge they seek. These websites link to others of like kind. Where Themes match and knowledge is similar to what the quester of knowledge is looking for. This is natural, where 'like' links to 'like'. To build traffic to our sites, we must began to build these terminals. These Link Way stations need to be link pages of nicely organized information.
When I am surfing the net, I save the kinds of websites containing content and links that I am looking for, into my Favorites folders, thus creating my own personal Link Directory. When I use my favorites, I am using the linking nature of the web to find new websites that I am looking for. My favorites, over time, become a personal Link Directory, organizing websites, many that have link directories of the knowledge I want. Once I have enough of these favorites, I stop going to the search engines for knowledge on these subjects because the knowledge I now have is better than the knowledge the SE's dispense. I'll only go back to the search engines when I'm researching a different Theme and start the process of collecting my Favorite links, but only if I can't find what I'm looking for, through links stored in my Favorites. I think most of us use the Internet in this fashion, don't you?
Don't just rely on a listing in the phone book to send you business. Having lots of signs pointing to your website and a clear easy path to it, will insure the thousands of new visitors will finally arrive.
Content has been reprinted with permission of the author. First appeared in http://www.cyber-robotics.com,
© 1999-2000 David Notestine, all rights remain with author.
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