Understanding The Flow of Internet Traffic, to Attain Website Traffic Part 1
To attain visitor traffic to your website you must understand how traffic flows throughout the internet. This understanding stems from the basic algorithm of the Internet and the goals of it's original creators. The goal of the creators was to link the knowledge of mankind together by using hyperlinks. That's it. You can be on one page of content and click a link, to be sent to another. Links point to sites or pages of similar content. The Internet grew and became what is today because of a simple basic goal, but we are leaving that basic premise by relying on search engines to move traffic to our websites. What we have today has become a quest to store all the knowledge of mankind into search engine databases. This is unnatural to the way the web is designed and should be used. Trying to store all the information in a giant database, doesn't work and never will. Results are diluted and the knowledge grows faster than robots can index it. No search engine database has indexed over 17% of the Internet and adding up all the knowledge of all the databases doesn't even equal 40%. Those numbers include 800,000,000 web pages and there are those that say, there's over 3,000,000,000 (yes, 3 billion) web pages. Why are your web pages going to have placement in the top 30 listings from search engine queries? Are your website's pages any better than the next website's?
You must be listed in the top 30 to get any traffic. For most of us, the quest for ownership of the top ten, twenty or even thirty single keywords or phrases, in the SEs, is a waste of time. I get millions of hits a month to my cyber-robotics.com website but I bet I only get three qualified visitors a day from the search engines. There are lots of websites pertaining to website marketing and I just can't compete. There are just too many. If you have a website dealing in non-competitive Themes or subjects, like Nepenthes Carnivorous Plants only grown in Borneo, then you may have a chance to corner the market in Nepenthes. But there are those of us who type our subject keywords into search engine query textboxes, and the return listing consists of 3,456,142 pages and ours is listing number 109,234. We must assume that's doing pretty good as that's still in the top 3% :-) And even if we found out what does work in the search engines, the next person copies. Plus you have probably discovered on your own, that the keyword you own for a few days in the search engines query results, doesn't give you the qualified traffic you want. Traffic flooding in today is gone tomorrow, like a switch being turned on and off, exciting but brief. We have all thought, at one time or another, that search engines were everything and without traffic from the search engines, our websites were doomed to failure. That's what we have been taught, but we have been told the world is flat.
The continuation of this article will discuss how understanding the nature of the web will help every webmaster, attain the traffic they so richly deserve.