Most webmasters, for as long as the WWW has been a thing, have worked hard to increase traffic to their websites. Usually they recognize that more traffic doesn't necessarily equal more sales (hopefully) and perhaps they do know that increasing traffic at least increases the chance of a new sale.

Even when your goal is brand awareness and not sales or leads, increasing your traffic means that you increase your footprint.

The problem with traffic is that the quantity of visitors on your website is not necessarily an indicator of how well your website is performing. It's like the body mass index (BMI) of the marketing world. It's sort of an indicator.

Just like BMI doesn't measure body types, body fat percentage, healthy weight distributions and other key health indicators, quantity of visitors tracked will not give you an accurate read on the health of your website.

Enter analytics.

One of the best, free tools on the web to analyze user statistics, Google Analytics, allows you to achieve a better understanding of how users are not only using your website, but how they are arriving there in the first place. This could be through a number of means, including the percentage of users coming from search engines, other websites, or through traffic directly to your URL. You also can find out about how users are navigating the internal pages of your website, where they are dropping off, and whether or not they are completing your desired goals.

In my opinion, there are three key things you need to understand in order to successfully manage and improve the traffic on your website.

• Traffic Sources: Understanding from where your traffic comes allows you to modify tactics that aren't working and continue to improve those that are. If you are getting 90% of your traffic from social media, you might consider working on improving your search engine placement (or vice versa).
• View Where Users Leave: Discovering what pages where users leave your website can be very insightful. In fact, if they are leaving too fast, or bouncing, there might be problems with your advertising sources or the way your website is configured. If they are leaving after completing your primary goal then there is little concern, however if they are dropping out in the middle of the process, there may be things that you can do to better retain users.
• Set Conversion Goals: Setting goals for your users is also very important. You can monitor the percentage of users who are filling out your contact form, making a purchase, or downloading an item such as a Whitepaper.

So, what are you waiting for? Get your analytics on, now.

Google has long been the primary search engine on the internet, bringing in over 65% on average of search engine queries. The term Google has become so ubiquitous that google is the verb for searching on the web. Bing tried to make the same move but it will likely never happen even though they are in second place in the search engine market share; they are a very distant second at about 16% search share.

Because Google is the primary source for the majority of the searchers, our company focuses on adhering to what Google wants. The other search engines end up coming along at the same time. It is vital that your business keeps up with the latest updates from Google to ensure that your website remains in compliance with Google’s guidelines.

The biggest challenge is that the guidelines change on a regular basis. What was acceptable two years ago or even one year ago is no longer so.

Earlier this year Google released an update to their search algorithm with the Penguin 2.0 update. This updated changed the way that Google ranks results, which can have a direct effect on where your website appears through their search results.

Sometimes the changes included in the update are designed to kill the spamming that takes place in search engines... you know, from the unsavory folk that try to game the system. Usually, however, the updates are put in place to help provide more relevant search results to its users. Google does this by implementing changes that they feel will target those utilizing what are known as “black hat” SEO tactics. These include:

• Keyword Stuffing
• Hidden Text on Page
• Doorway Pages
• Duplicate Content
• Interlinking of Sites
• Link Farms

These are just a few of the tactics that may end up getting your website de-indexed by Google. You may not completely understand these terms and, perhaps, in a future post I'll take some time to discuss in greater detail. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, you will want to take time to understand these basic no-no tactics.

It is vital that you are staying up on the latest changes from Google so that you ensure you aren’t doing anything that could negatively affect your ranking in search results. Google puts out multiple small updates each year, and will usually have 1-2 large updates each year that has quite an impact on search rankings.

One of the best ways to ensure that you are staying in line with Google’s is to focus on creating unique and engaging content on your website and avoid tactics such as purchasing links or stuffing keywords on your page or in your code. Google will never punish a website for creating engaging content that is unique to their site, as the goal of Google is to provide this type of relevant result to their users.