Internet Mastery Center Blog

I never believe in buying traffic. How do you think visitors come to know me? Did they pay to know me? Most probably they subscribed because of a free download in the first place. You may not remember how but YOU are the traffic. You are targeted because I hit your hot button correctly :)

There are enough free resources out there on the Net to keep one busy with getting traffic, but here are the only 7 most effective methods: search engine optimization (SEO), link exchange, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, article submissions, blogging, viral marketing and massive giveaway events.

Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing your pages for the search engines so that your pages are optimized for the search engines to be searched with the most optimized keywords. You get the idea? SEO English is a bit like tongue twister. If you know the exact keywords your business or industry is famous for, you increase the density of those keywords in your page.

Actually, I don't understand why some folks make SEO sound so complicated. On the other hand, other folks say SE spiders are so smart at discerning quality of content such that SEO is really much ado about nothing. Moreover, SEO English is just so unnatural sometimes and abuse may constitute as keyword spamming, unless you know the secret to writing it 'fluently'. SEO is absolutely crucial in niche markets where competition in SE listings is not hot.

Exchanging links with like-minded webmasters create a network for increased traffic distribution. Interested visitors are free to visit your site when they see your link on other people's sites. SEO targeted towards Google is only half the battle. Its PageRank tool measures your page's link popularity and ranks it higher according to scale. The more links pointing into your site as opposed to pointing out, the merrier.

* PageRank looks at pages, not sites.

Pay-per-click advertising is all about how much you are willing to pay the PPC program for a high listing so that visitors take notice of your link and visit it. You incur the bid price you set for yourself for every visit (click). Considering ROI, this is particularly useful when you are selling a product. Security features are in place so there's no point being trigger-happy if you don't like some sites. ;)

Article submissions can give you an amazing amount of traffic, but only if you use the method right. You should make sure the content you're submitting is easily understandable, and only covers one or two points, leading the people back to your site with your resource box. Most importantly, you need to make sure that your article is interesting, compelling, and of course, informative. Once you've submitted these articles to several article directories, you'll probably see a marked rise in link backs, traffic and more.

Blogging is a free way to make sure that you're reaching traffic in all regions of your niche. It has come up in stature from its days of being simply a place to 'share' with your friends and is now a valid, and often well used promotional structure for a site—or even a basis for the site itself. Using WordPress especially can mean that you've got an easy-to-promote, amazingly simple to update site structure that allows you to build and maintain effortlessly. As a traffic generation tool, it is also a good way to create, maintain and direct traffic to your site. The more you blog using popular search terms related to your niche, the more intensive you're practicing SEO as the archiving system of the WordPress blog script is absolutely well suited for Google indexing. Try to post on alternate days if not everyday.

Viral Marketing is everything and anything to do with propagating your name and URL through giving away free e-books, reports, article and e-zine submission, classified ads etc. But this is only by technological means. With people, we are talking about word-of-mouth.

Massive giveaway events come once in a while but they are really the biggest source of opt-in subscribers for anyone who participate in them. The organizer announces a proposal to carry out such an event, inviting contributors to submit a product of their own or one with resell rights to be given away for free. When the event begins, anyone and everyone can download all these exclusive products as long as they opt in. It's very easy to get 1,000 subscribers in a week.

Of course, the organizer gets the most numbers, but he also puts in the most work to make sure the web server doesn't collapse due to traffic overload, the gifts don't go missing and the event proceeds on schedule.

Awareness and application of the 7 above traffic generation methods slowly but surely builds a good list of followers who are willing to patronize us.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

When you want to take control and are thinking of starting your own affiliate program, there are certain things you will need to offer. You need to make it easy for affiliates to get on board and get started right away. To do this, you will need to offer them certain things to work with. You should immediately tell them everything they need to know in the first e-mail you send to them. You don't have to go into great detail about it but you can touch on certain things and give more detail on your site. Take a look at some of the tools you can offer affiliates to keep them interested and functioning.

Advertisements

If you want your own affiliate program to work you need ads that are effective. You should make sure they are effective before you start handing them out to affiliates. You don't have to offer a ton of ads to affiliates at first. Start with a few and change them as you can. You can choose to allow affiliates to write ads as well for a better result. Remember, if your ads are no good, there is no point in having an affiliate program in the first place.

Graphics

You really need to make your available graphics easier than ever for affiliates to use. If you try to get complicated, they will not be effective. Set up your website so all the affiliate has to do is cut and past the HTML code into their own web page editor. When you do this, they will be more likely to use your graphics effectively. In addition, you need to be sure to display a small set of instructions for those who don't know what they are doing.

Content

One thing you shouldn't forget when you want to start your own affiliate program is content. You should offer your affiliates content they can use. They can paste the article onto their site and get more traffic. In addition, you can encourage them to write their own as well and update them regularly. The more updates they make to their content, the more people they will draw in and the more money everyone will make overall.

As you can see, as long as you offer simple and helpful tools to affiliates, you can think about starting your own affiliate program with no problems. Try having everything set up before you start signing affiliates up. When you have everything already planned out, you won't get as frazzled with the process. In fact, it should be a very fun and easy process overall. Starting your own affiliate program is beneficial to you and to the affiliates. When the program is so effective for everyone, you will be a huge success.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor. If your URL shows up far down the results list, the chances of the consumer never finding you increase incrementally. Once you achieve a high search engine position, it is essential that you make sure you maintain the high ranking you have worked so hard to achieve.

This means you must come up with a strategy to monitor your search engines positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you let your stock portfolio be ruled by chance and market fluctuations, or would you keep close tabs on your stocks so you could buy and sell when the time is right? This is the way you must consider your search engines positions.

Be aware that at first, after you have launched your search engine campaign and done all the right things to increase your rankings, you will most likely see a continual upward climb. What you need to be on the lookout for is the moment that upward climb reaches a plateau. When this happens, your search engine position campaign moves into stage two, the monitoring and protecting stage.

In stage two, do not be concerned about the short-term fluctuations in your positions. These are similar to the subtle rising and falling of stocks in a portfolio. Short-term movement is an integral part of the whole process. It's the long-term changes that you must watch for and prepare to act on immediately.

Analyzing the long-term trends of search engines positions is imperative. The way in which search engines rank websites may change at the drop of hat. If you are unaware of these changes—many of which are subtle yet can be deadly to your ranking—your position may drop to the bottom of the list before you can get your bearings. To prevent this kind of precipitous drop, you must create a system to monitor your positions on a monthly basis. Devise a chart to keep tabs on your top ranking positions or your top pages, and make sure to watch "the market" closely.

Each search engine uses a formula to compute website rankings. When a search engine changes this formula in any way, it may raise or lower your ranking. Some search engines use a number of different formulas, rotating them so that a formula doesn't become overused or outdated. Depending on which formula is being applied, your search engine position may suddenly drop or rise in rank significantly. Therefore, you must check your positions frequently in order to catch when a search engine changes formulas and what effect it has on your positions.

You must also deal with your competition—a crucial factor you must always be vigilant about. Your competitor's position may suddenly rise, automatically lowering your position. Or their position may drop, pushing your position higher. Each month, expect position changes due to the continual changes that are occurring in your competitor's position, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy to compensate for decreased rankings. Monitoring these fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website to increase your position in search results.

Of course, you must discern what the most popular search engines are in order for your monitoring efforts to be effective. Right now, there are ten popular search engines that direct most of Internet traffic to your sites. The challenge you face is that these top ten may change from month to month.

This means that your must not only monitor your search engine positions, but you must also keep track of the ranking popularity of the search engines you are monitoring. Find out which search engines people use most frequently every month and be sure to live in the present! People are fickle about their favorite search engines, and it takes constant vigilance to follow their dalliances. The search engines they loved when you first launched your campaign may be old news in the next few months. You must adjust your list of engines according to the whims of the Internet users. Check out http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html for a current list of website favorites.

Another factor to monitor carefully is a sudden drop of your positions in all search engines. This is not the same as monthly fluctuations—this is a neon red warning sign! It could mean a number of different things.

It all your search engine positions have plummeted, it may indicate that search engines spiders—those sneaky programs that seek out your site and rank their positions—have found some type of problem with your website. If you have recently changed the code, for instance, the spider may become utterly confused and consequently drop your positions disastrously. If a spider creeps up on your website when it is down for adjustments or changes, you may actually disappear from a search engine index entirely. Or a search engine may drastically change its formula, and suddenly all of your websites come up as irrelevant. If that search engine is a current favorite, it may create a domino effect, causing all of your position to drop in all search engines.

Some search engines rely on the results from other search engines, and it is vital that you know which engines these are and keep track of all the engines they influence. The biggest problem here is that search engines will sometimes change affiliations, and this can create a major shift in the geography of the Internet. For example, recently Yahoo decided to display only results gleaned from Google. So you must not only monitor your own positions, but you must keep abreast of seismic shifts in the landscape of the Internet as a whole.

Finally, pay attention to your keywords. Keywords are the foundation bricks of the entire search engine system, and they demand individual scrutiny in your monitoring efforts. If you have found that a number of your positions have plummeted, it may mean that a page of your website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders. Or the competition for that particular keyword or phrase has recently rocketed into outer space. In either case, you must act quickly and efficiently to regain lost ground.

Your search engine marketing campaign is an investment. If costs you time and money on a continual basis. Protect this investment as diligently as you would your financial portfolio. In the same way, track your positions from an objective perspective, and monitor your positions on a regular basis. Make sure your time and effort reap rewards by keeping your eye on the big picture—your long-term marketing campaign.


Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

Who controls the Internet? Don't be surprised if we say it's the major search engine (SE) companies. While it gets more baffling to keep up with their ever-changing algorithms or whatever criteria (as and when they like it) and more convenient to label them as notorious for indexing your web pages only to see them suddenly dropped altogether, there are at least some things you can do to maintain your SE visibility in the long term.

1) Create a sitemap. This sitemap page contains all possible links to sections that make up your site's overall structure. Submit this page and you are submitting the whole site to be spidered, not just the home page.

2) Keep your site flat. As far as spider algorithm goes, it's not easy to register web pages more than 3 levels deep. Pages that are too deep are considered insignificant and submitting them can be detriment to your site's overall ranking status. Focus on building significant sections of your sites, create a sitemap pointing to these sections and let the spiders search for themselves.

3) Submit everywhere except the major SEs. There are hundreds of minor SEs you can submit your site to, but as your site gets more prolific, soon the spiders from Google, Yahoo, MSN, AllTheWeb, Hotbot, AOL, Teoma and Lycos will take notice and see it for themselves. Sites 'naturally' caught by spiders are seen as quality content, will rank highly and less likely to drop.

4) Avoid CGI-generated pages. These type of pages usually contain symbols like a question mark and ampersand to separate parameters. A typical URL would look like: http://www.sitename.com/cgi-bin/pagename.pl?cat=gardens&subcat=japanese

If you observe search results from time to time, most major engines refuse to index these pages. Wherever possible, create non-CGI pages. They give no clues that they are instantly and artificially 'churned' out which is exactly what spiders are looking for to censure. Pages employing dynamic technologies like PHP, XML etc. are just fine.

5) Cultivate your site. As long as you add in fresh content, spiders will take notice and come back just as often. Spiders seem to use a 'trained' schedule to learn that your site always stays up-to-date and come back to take a look. Update less often and the spidering frequency lessens.

6) Linking strategies. More than just one-to-one manual link exchanges, you will find every possible way to submit articles, give testimonials, comment in blogs, participate in forums etc. all for the sake of creating link-backs to your site by leaving your signature behind. To put it bluntly, hijack other people's web space to create backward links. If your pages don't show up, at least your keywords or domain name shown from other sites will.

7) Create a mini-web. Build mini-sites around an overall and similar theme and link them together interdependently. This pattern of incoming links here and there establishes and builds up each site's link popularity, and links from same-subject websites are now ranked higher in the search engines than they do if stand-alone.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don't know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven't been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.

However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website.

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of buyers and divide that figure by the number of visitors. Then multiply that result by 100 (25 × 100 ÷ 2000).

If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it's too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

One of the key characteristics of Web 2.0 is participation, collaboration and moderation through the use of web applications. Web 2.0 sites derive their power from the human connections and network effects from this characteristic that is made possible, and grow in effectiveness the more people use them.

The idea of "participation, collaboration and moderation" can take many forms. If you look back history, bulletin boards are one form, online forums are another, online multiplayer games, content management systems (e.g. Wikis, Joomla), dating sites and classifieds as well. If not for features that enable multiple users to create their own space within a website via registering accounts or at least leave a message (like a comment in a blog), the communication culture would have been one-way (from the webmaster to the visitors) and remain stuck in 1.0.

Why would a webmaster want to go Web 2.0? We learned that social networkers want to expand their personal network of online friends. On the other hand, the webmaster desires to build up a core group of active participants who unconsciously help to sustain the 'liveliness' and therefore the longevity of the website and its agenda or interests while the overall database of users expand. In this manner, a lot of the effort that goes into building the database (or list) becomes very much hands-off for the webmaster. There's leverage. This is also where moderation comes in. The role of the webmaster naturally becomes that of the moderator, whose job is to maintain some semblance of order (but not to the point of creating a restrictive environment) and general site maintenance. It gets better when the webmaster can promote participants into moderators themselves, and more and more s/he becomes the "silent puppetmaster" behind the scene without doing much. It may not be easy, but the whole mindset of being a moderator is to gain confidence in just "letting it be" and letting his/her site runs by itself.

Now that the webmaster's motivation is addressed, s/he must find ways to avoid competition by finding new twists to contribute to the Web 2.0 bandwagon. Much as new sites keep popping up in recent months, somehow no 2 sites are made the same and they certainly enjoy a good amount of traffic anyway. It would be better when you can boil down social networking to the context of a specific niche, like a site to exchange Mexican recipes or talk about Ferrari car accessories or business opportunities in Central Asia. You can better target the type of people you are looking for and it also gives them a sharper sense of purpose to engage with and within your site.

At the end of the day, social networking is all about sharing valuable content and making friends. The successful Web 2.0 webmaster is one who knows how to tap on this human desire to the fullest and consistently encourages such a desire to grow within the culture of the social network he has created by offering further privileges for more prominent members. Really, there's no better way for them to build up credibility and make their personalities known than to be consistently 'alive' and 'happening' on the Net. From the SEO standpoint of view, you can also accumulate more backlinks and subsequently more traffic to your social networking site.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

As Web 2.0 becomes less of just a buzzword and more of a reality, the types of sites webmasters need to publish will increasingly become more important. In other words, mini-sites are slowly dying and cookie-cutter article sites are on the way out as well. Web surfers will become more value-focused and web companies will become larger.

Over the next few years expect larger conglomerates to be buying up profitable websites in their chosen markets. Expect smaller sites to either be bought or driven out of business. My intention is not to scare you, but this outcome is inevitable.

Large businesses have always taken two approaches to their desired markets. They either buy their competition or they push them out of business. You want to be prepared when this trend begins on the Internet.

Being a webmaster and online marketer, you should be preparing for one of two scenarios. To position yourself for a buyout to a larger company or to become the larger company that dominates your chosen market.

Whichever route you choose is entirely up to you, but I would suggest that it would be in your best interest to begin focusing on authority sites. You can either start building them or turning your current sites into them. Whatever your approach may be, I assure you it will help you sleep better at night.

What Is The Definition Of An Authority Site?

A fairly comprehensible authority site definition was put forward by Jason Dowdell of Global Promoter. Jason defined it this way: "Authority sites are sites that have been linked to and referenced on other web sites covering the same subject matter and they also will have hundreds if not thousands of pages covering that subject matter and nearly every facet of it."

That definition is one man's opinion, albeit a good one, but let us go directly to the source. Many search engine optimization and search engine marketing experts believe Google has derived their primary algorithm from a document titled, "Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents".

The PageRank formula as we know it today was derived from this paper, and the authors, Bharat and Mihaila, define an authority site in the text below:

"We believe a page is an authority on the query topic if and only if some of the best experts on the query topic point to it. Of course in practice some expert pages may be experts on a broader or related topic. If so, only a subset of the hyperlinks on the expert page may be relevant."

"In such cases the links being considered have to be carefully chosen to ensure that their qualifying text matches the query. By combining relevant out-links from many experts on the query topic we can find the pages that are most highly regarded by the community of pages related to the query topic. This is the basis of the high relevance that our algorithm delivers."

What we have reprinted above is the foundation of the PageRank system and the determination for deciding which sites will be authorities. I highly recommend you read and re-read the full document until you understand every aspect of it.

What Are the Components Of An Authority Site?

Allow me to present you with a diagram that dissects your typical authority site. As you can tell from the diagram, a considerable number of components and systems must be in place for the authority site to function profitably and reap the benefits of the "Authority Site Formula".

The Authority Site Formula = Visitor Optimization (VO) + Content Optimization (CO) * Creative Marketing (CM)

A simple question must be asked. What do 99.9% of authority sites provide? In a sentence, an incredible amount of original content and a superb visitor experience. The search engines want you to succeed and they want you to make money, but you have to play by their rules. In the future, focus your efforts on visitor optimization and content optimization instead of search engine optimization.

What Is The Anatomy Of An Authority Site?

About.com is the definition and was the original authority site. Their site has a generic domain name and hundreds of subdomains on different topics.

Your authority site should take the same approach, but not on such a general level. If you launch an authority site, it should be geared towards a well-defined and large market. After you launch the site and generate some traffic, you should create subdomains that cover specific areas inside that larger market.

For example, Diabetic-Resources.Com is not an active site; but if it were, then a typical authority site setup would be something like:

* http://supplies.diabetic-resources.com
* http://diet.diabetic-resources.com
* http://insurance.diabetic-resources.com
* http://symptoms.diabetic-resources.com
* http://treatment.diabetic-resources.com

Using this approach, you are able to target your general market while generating more targeted traffic pertaining to related sub-markets.

As a rule of thumb, the index pages on your domains and subdomains should be more focused on content, but the article and commentary pages should be more focused on advertising. Just do not ever lose sight of the most important aspect of your site, which is visitor experience otherwise known as visitor optimization.

What Does It Take To Create An Authority Site?

You want to create a site that generates thousands of visitors a day mainly through the major search engines, and would ultimately be the one-stop source for information in that particular market.

Your site must employ 3 traits to become an authority site. Let's discuss all 3 necessary aspects:

Dynamic: You should have as many RSS feeds as you can muster to incorporate throughout your site. Your visitors need to be able to receive RSS feeds for any keyword, category or archive as well as create their own. One feed is no longer enough to satisfy your visitors.

Interactive: You should be engaging the minds of your visitors at all times using surveys, commenting and feedback. Make these features easy for your visitors and your site will grow exponentially. Why? Because they feel like you actually care about them. Interaction is a powerful tool and creates a sense of community on your site.

Consistent: You should post to your blog often, and you should always provide quality and original content. That doesn't mean you need to produce 800-word articles 3 times a week. Your goal should be to become a news master. You need to be an "authority" on the news happening in your niche.

If you follow the steps and guidelines listed above, then you will be on your way to being the owner of an authority site.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

When choosing a web host, not just any host will do.

There are specific features that you need to look for, as well as additional features that will be required depending on what your plans for your website are. It is important that you make sure that your web host is able to accommodate your needs from the very beginning.

One of the first features you should look for in a web host, no matter what your plans are for your site, is the guaranteed uptime. While no web host can guarantee that your site will be up 100% of the time, you definitely want to choose a host that guarantees at least a 99% uptime, and preferably a 99.9% uptime.

A 100% satisfaction guarantee is also vital. Often, you won't be able to tell if a web host can fulfill all of your needs until you sign up for the service. If you find out that the web host does not meet all of your requirements, you will want to have the option of canceling your service and getting a refund. Not all web hosts offer this, so be on the lookout for it.

You definitely want a web host that has a power generator to deal with power outages, and also one that does automatic, scheduled backups of your data. A web host that uses DOS protection, to protect against Denial of Service Attacks as well as other types of attacks, is also vital.

Finally, 2 other features that you should look for, no matter what other features you may require, are server monitoring, where the web-hosting company monitors the servers 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, and e-mail support, where you can get your questions answered or issued addressed 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

Once you've found a host that offers everything above, you are ready to look at other features that you may require, such as an adequate amount of disk space and bandwidth. You may also require unlimited FTP accounts and e-mail accounts.

MySQL databases will be important to some web-hosting customers, as well as e-mail lists.

Depending on your plans, you may also require subdomains, parked domains, and add-on domain names. If you don't know much about HTML or building web pages, you need a web host that offers a web page builder. Other features you may require include FrontPage extensions, Dreamweaver Compatibility, the ability to install a blog or a forum, or several other scripts that make your site more interactive.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.

Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don't understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let's start by examining the most basic data—the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These figures are the most accurate measure of your website's activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.

There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as "hits" and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your home page has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.

The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.

It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.

Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.

If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that particular page.

As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.

Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. This is normal unless you notice an exit trend on a particular page that is not intended as an exit page. In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are exiting your website on a page not designed for that purpose, you must closely examine that particular page to discern what the problem is. Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.

After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it's time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor—meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase—the more valuable that keyword is.

However, if you find a large number of visitors are being directed—or should I say misdirected—to your site by a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword demands adjustment. Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Close analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you a vital understanding of your visitor's needs and motivations.

Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com