The Perpetual Website Enhancement Cycle
One of the key indicators of a website’s success and its ability to generate income is the amount of targeted traffic it receives. What is targeted traffic? This refers to the traffic you receive that is related to the niche or market your website is aimed at. For example, if your website is about horses for the purposes of selling horse products and gadgets, getting traffic from people doing searches with the keyword “dogs” on Google will be of little value. If you don’t know what the aim of your website is, please take time to do this now.
My Mr.Gadget website is aimed at selling gadgets in Australia. If you do a search in Google for “gadget australia”, you’ll see we are (hope we still are at this time of reading) number one for this search result. This took many months of research, tweaking and hard work.
In order to increase your targeted traffic you need to understand what keyword, websites, sources are bringing you in traffic. Based on your understanding of this, you can then tweak or optimize your website to attract even more traffic and therefore increase your website revenue. Ka-ching!
Coming from an IT background, I like to break things down into simple forms to understand a concept. Understanding your website traffic is part of what I like to call the Perpetual Web Enhancement Cycle. This is a structured process flow that describes the installation of a metrics tool through to highlighting the re-iterative nature of website tweaking. I believe that all successful websites follow this general flow with some modifications here and there.
Here is the Perpetual Web Enhancement Cycle presented in a flow diagram:
Step 1. Install a Website Traffic Analytic Tool
Like any close friendship, you need to spend time and effort getting to know your companion so you can truly get the best out of each other. This is exactly the same with your web traffic. How does one do this? First things first, install a website traffic analytic tool (WTAT). As the name suggests the primary role of this tool is to gather information on the traffic that comes in and out of your site.
Popular Web Traffic Analytic Tools To Try Out:
- Sitemeter (Using this now for 2 sites)
- Statcounter
- Google Analytics
- Urchin
- AWStats
Step 2. Burn in WTAT for 30 days
Once you’ve found a tool that you like, give it 30 days to gather information on your website. Most of them will ask you to install a script on each page to trigger data collection so make sure you follow all the prescribed steps. After 30 days, you’ll have a workable data set.
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