As you can imagine, website owners may have reasons for
hiding the true amount of traffic to their website. This
may include the owners of "portals", those websites
which list many others and hope to charge for the priviliedge.
Many will make wild claims of high traffic and page views
in order to encourage other website owners to become a
paid up client.
How do you check their claims? Some of course, use a
counter visible somewhere on the site. However, these
can quite easily be "fiddled" to start from
an imaginary high figure in the first place; to add apparent
visits without that actually occuring; to add a random
number greater than 1 for each real visit.
Others link to external stat counters and sophisticated
stats facilities, but these are generally password protected.
Others use internal stats packages, again generally protected
by a username and password set.
Luckily, there are now a number of on-line tools - some
more reliable than others - for checking the traffic levels
of websites. One such tool is run by Amazon, on www.alexa.com.
This particular one is useful in that you download a toolbar
which will automatically display the relative traffic
ranking, of virtually every website you visit, (though
not those on a secure server). The toolbar is recognised
as Spyware by virus scanning applications, because each
time you visit a website with the toolbar in operation,
it provides Alexa with realtime information about those
visits, in order to update its traffic information. The
traffic ranking given by Alexa therefore relies on information
gained from those who have downloaded the toolbar, but
this is an ever growing number and so it's accuracy grows
over time. Alexa's stated aim is to promote honesty on
the web and is, we feel, worth considering. You can use
the Alexa website itself to check relative traffic rankings,
without having to download the toolbar, simply by adding
a website address into a query form.
Be aware though, that when checking the Alexa ranking
of a website with machine names, for example, www.somename.fsnet.co.uk,
that the ranking you will see is that of the hub, www.fsnet.co.uk
and not an indication that the website you have visited
is a high traffic one.
There are a number of other websites providing traffic
ranking information, many of which generally involve visiting
them to enter the URL of the website you wish to check
into a query form.
So, if you are approached by a company stating that their
portal benefits from a high amount of traffic, unique
visitors, page views etc., and urging you to pay to be
listed, visit Alexa.com or one of the other traffic measuring
websites to check for yourself.
But is high traffic the be all and end all? Is
it really worth paying for a listing on a high traffic
website? Will it actually do you any good? Well, take
into consideration the following:
1. A website with 1 million page views a day and 1 million
pages of information about those on its database will
mean an average of 1 visit per day to each page. If the
number of pages is reduced by listing 100 clients on a
single page, then the choice presented to the surfer may
be overwhelming - who to choose from the 100 there. The
end result is much the same, no major impact to your own
website traffic will be made - unless you have opted for
enhanced / priority listings, banners and patches, pop
up windows etc. etc., which you will pay a premium for.
Even then, is it worth opting for a banner which will
display your products and services to many who are not
remotely interested in your services.
2.A website benefitiing from 1000 visits a day but with
only 100 clients in its database will generate 10 visits
per listing on average - simple mathematics.
3. A well optimised portal website with fresh content
displayed regularly, can generate a healthy amount of
relevant traffic to its listed pages.
But how do you optimise a website for 1 million different
subjects? There ARE ways, but many don't bother to do
so.
So, although traffic levels are important to
a "portal" website which is dedicated to generating
traffic to other websites, what may be more important
is the level of traffic relative to the number of those
listed within. 100 visits per day to a website containing
2 in the list is far more effective for the 2 listed than
100,000 visits to a website with 100,000 in the database.
Example? On the run up to last year's
Guy Fawkes night, our relatively small portal received
a sudden boost in traffic numbering in the several thousands
of visits. This was due to the presence of a client's
page within. The client performs quality fireworks displays,
which of course the visitors were looking for. Those potential
visitors, found our client's details - just when they
needed to.
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