Please read the introduction before reading part 1 - 6.
So here we are at Part 3 - Be aware of your popularity.
a) Learn the measurement
An individual
hit is each file sent to a browser by a web server.
A
page view is, not considering the hits generated, is each time a visitor views a webpage on your site. A hit is different - When a visitor visits your page, they may see numerous elements AKA files (e.g. image) which generates multiple hits. The hit counts depend on the number of images on your page + 1, being the page (php/html) file.
To measure your site's or page's popularity, you use page views and not hits, because on each page view, it can generate hundreds of hits.
Visits are different. On each visit by a certain visitor (or even a bot), it can contain numerous page views and hits.
b) How to do it
So the real question is, how to attract visitors? There are a lot of ways to do this.
- Provide good content, have a great website in general.
Make people glad they found you! Using the factors I mentioned and will mention in this series of articles, you can make a great website if you have the patience and effort for it. What does this help in making you gain more visitors?
-Makes them want to come back.
-They can use your resources and link back, or are just linking to an awesome site.
-Gives you good reputation.
And quite a few more that I can't think of, but that I'm sure exist.
- Submit your site to search engines.
I know this might not help much (most people won't bother searching on a search engine because a lot of unrelated sites such as business sites by business men (XD) will show up instead), but it still helps sometimes. If the person knows of your site's name but forgot the address or just heard of it, they can google it up. Or if the person made an unrelated search and your site came up. Whatever the reason, you should do it anyway:
For Google: www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
For Yahoo Directory: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
For Yahoo! Search: http://submit.search.yahoo.com
For MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
Don't forget the meta tags! (Don't ask me for them, I forgot them myself and I'm still walking around all blind x_x)
- Affiliates and link exchanges
Before we start on this I would like to say that we're not USING your affiliates and LEs for more visitors. I see it everywhere. "U HVAE TO BE E MY FRIEND TO AFFIIAETLITE". If you take a look at the business/marketing sites, on most of them (on the extent of my poor knowledge) affiliates are nothing more than mere organizations to attract more visitors to the site. In the little (and much more fun) web design community, we used that idea and turned it into something more friendly.
I agree with that idea. In the web design community, we are much less serious and are much more friendly and open. I mean come on, we aren't even doing real business and marketing! ... Okay what am I blabbing about. But seriously. Affiliates and LEs, other than serving the purpose of learning new things, making new friends in the web design community... you can also gain visits from them. From time to time I like to visit a single site, and clicking on all of their affiliates to see what those sites are like. Because whenever I get to see a new webdesign site, I feel really excited and I love to explore around. What I mean is, I just keep clicking, just like tree branches.
If I visit site A, I click on the affiliates, site B, C, D and E. On site B, I can see a list of more affiliates including: Site A, F, G, H. Once I visit site F, G, H, I notice than site H has a list of affiliates that include site B, C, G, I. I have already visited site B, C and G, so I continue with site I. You get the idea? ^-^
'Web rings' were around and popular for a while, but I don't see them that much anymore. You can also consider directories made by fellow web designers in the web designing community. You can also try banner rotations/exchanges, such as the infamous banner exchange at animeshare.org.
Keep these things in mind, and you're ready for
Part 4 - Update often!
