Traffic

In internet marketing, term traffic usually refers to the people visiting a specific website/web page.

However, the actual definition of the term web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by a visitor to a website. This data includes the number of visitors, the number of pages in each website that they visit, the length of time they stay on the website and on each page of that site, the path they take to navigate through the website, the pages and sites where these visitors came from (referrers), and other information.

Website owners track web traffic by embedding an HTML code in each certain pages of the website. An external application then does the analysis of the data yielded by that piece of code.

Web traffic is tracked and analyzed in order to measure the popularity of the site as well as find ways in which to improve or optimize the website. There are different methods used for increasing web traffic. Two of the most common methods are:

Search engine optimization (SEO) – This entails tweaking on page factors such as Alt-tags, using keywords, etc as well as on page factors such as link building in order to place better in search engine results pages.

Online ads – This include on-page advertisements like pay-per-click ads, banner ads, and inline ads, as well as bulk email (can be spam or not).