A Statistical Approach To Increasing Your Website Visitors
 by: Neil MacLeod


By now your website is listed in the search engines and you are looking at bringing more targetted traffic into your website. People who are specifically interested in what you have to offer. By understanding estimated click percentages on search engine pages, and by targetting the correct keywords, which we will also look at, we can set a strategy to target a certain number of visitors per month.

The estimated click percentage is the percentage of people who click on your website when they see it on the search engine listing after they have typed in a specific keyword or keyword phrase. If you type in a keyword, and your website appears on page one , above the fold (what is visible on the screen without scrolling down) then we would expect approximately 3.5% of people to click on your link. This figure is based on my own calculations, Using your statistics and reporting packages, you may get a more accurate figure.

We are going to use Yahoo as our search engine of choice since we can then use their keyword suggestion tool to give us a good idea of number of searches. If you use google then multiply the figures by two and if you want to use MSN then divide the figures by two. As a rough estimate!

Use the Yahoo keyword tool to provide a list of targetted keywords which will bring people into your website. Now, an important point to note here. Be realistic. If you are in the web design business for example, you will probably not be able to get on page one of yahoo for the keyword phrase web design. But, you may be able to get on page one for a more targetted keyword such as using your location e.g. 'web design milton keynes' or 'affordable website design uk'.

So what do we do now? We build our website page, knowing all we know about search engine optimisation and put some unique content on that page relevant to your business and relevant to 'afforable website design uk'. 250 or so words should suffice, may be an image also. Add this into your sitemap using the the keyword phrase as the anchor text and you are ready to go. One of the most common complaints I get about website content is that nobody has time to do it. The reality is that if you want your website to succeed you have to ensure that your website has enough content. Plan it in, and make it a regular exercise. You can also pay other people to do it if you like, but I would put money on it that somewhere in your cupboards you have loads of literature you can use which is copyrighted to you. When you are distributing article content or exchanging links, we now have another keyword to target.

So this is where the statistics come in. That keyword phrase 'affordable website design uk' was searched 432 times in Yahoo UK, in the month I looked. So I can predict that it will take a small while to get that site in the first page using our other search engine optimisation techniques (you should realise by now that getting into the first page takes more than just one article, there are lots of things your webmaster must do, the point is it is a lot easier with lower searched traffic, particularly in Yahoo and MSN). I can also predict that it will bring 15 people a month into my site for that page, based on my calculation of 3.5% of people clicking on our website if it is on the first page of 432 searches.

Now put your strategic planning cap on. In a one years time, if you do on average two articles a week, which should take you no longer than half an hour each, that is 100 articles. And for each article we get approximately 15 people coming into our site specifically targetting our keywords, we have 1500 targetted visitors per month. Yahoo! indeed.

Now what has happened here. We have to be determined, we have to be consistent and we have to understand that as you add each article and maybe also use it for article distribution, your website will be growing full of content related to your products. Keyword rich and search engine and visitor friendly.

This article is aimed at you the website owner, and you need to understand that this is possible and the figures mentioned are estimates, but I would suggest underestimated, if you use this method consistently, alongside your other Internet marketing strategies, your traffic will grow exponentially.

About The Author
Neil MacLeod runs http://www.web-studio.co.uk, an affordable web design business in Buckinghamshire, providing web site and web marketing services . Neil has been building websites since 1999 and is a founding member of the IT and Web Network.