SEO Archives - Work Plaza 1

Website traffic refers to the number of people who visit a website. This visit can come from various sources namely:

Organic search – through the search engines; and it can based on keywords used in search.

Direct search – when a url is specifically typed into google search bar, and

Referrals – visitors coming from other websites, social media, and paid ads.

On the other hand, website audience refers to a particular group of people who visit a website, the length of time they stayed, and how they engaged with the site. Their characteristics like age, location, interest, gender can all be measured.

After studying your audience it is also possible to segment them based on what they did on the site.

What factors contribute to Website Traffic

As we’ve learnt earlier, the on page SEO factors we put in place when writing our post all contribute to helping visitors find our sites. For example

Using keywords at vantage places in blog posts;
Writing high quality content;
Provision for sharing posts on social media;
Engagement on social media;
People linking back to the site.

How Important is Website Traffic Monitoring?

Customising a site for SEO helps understand a site’s performance. You can check dates, time and frequency of visitors. Also checked is the time of stay on the site, known as bounce rate. Such analysis is also needed when you run ads for offers on your site. There are free and also paid tools for this purpose. These tools check organic traffic as well as traffic from other sources like social media.

If you want to go for such a tool make sure it has all the features you need.

Free Traffic Feed Tools

An example is the free Live Traffic Feed also known as Feedjit tool. It actually shows a visitor’s location, time of visit and the page visited. It can be added to a site through adding html code pasted manually into the site’s theme or html window. A plugin version can also be used I stead.

Feedjit is a real time traffic checker, that is very simple to set up and use. It can help in decision making and improve content creation as it states exactly where visitors land on a website.

There are several real time traffic checkers, both free and paid to check out.

Other Benefits of the Free Traffic Checker Tool

It helps in deciding what improvements to make to the site. For example instead of deleting a page, you may decide to leave a page intact if you see people landing on it.

Products can also be introduced for the benefit of visitors.

Not everyone likes to see a live traffic feed on his site. However if you decide to use it, learn how to customise and set it properly and make the most of it.

Heat Map Tools

An alternative to using a live traffic feed is to use a heat map. It is a tool that shows data in the form of a map or diagram. The individual values are represented by various colours. It is possible to understand user experience just by looking at the map, with a key showing what the various colours stand for. It shows where visitors are on your site using spotted sightings.

User behaviour analysis

The objective of using these tools is to find and determine who the actual audience of your website are, by analysing their behaviours, target and engage with returning visitors while providing them with valuable information, and products.

General factors that help in Audience Targeting

Website themes must be mobile friendly to aid user experience. This means blog pages must be easy to access on mobile first and then the design is used for desktop.

Statistica – “…58.99% of all web traffic was accessed through mobile phones.”

Social media share buttons that enable sharing of your posts on social media must be installed. Your presence on social is also desirable so visitors can move from blog to social and vice versa

Website content can be localised to suit your geographic location. Terms, language, names and telephone numbers used in the location are needed for this.

Segmentation of audience based on what they showed interest in also is necessary for follow up with exact needs

After getting some traffic you’ll want to increase it in order to get more targeted audience. That will be the subject of another post.

I think you now know the difference between website traffic and website audience. this should help you what to focus on or not.

If you’ve enjoyed this post, please leave me a comment, like and share it.

Website structure

Website structure – what does it mean? It means the way to arrange the following elements on your website to make them found by the search engines and improve the site’s rankings:

pages,
menu,
categories,
content,
images,
headings and sub-headings,
link etc.

It is part of what you should be thinking about as you design your site and write your content and this will bring about a good site structure. This will enable better user experience and high ranking for the site.

Website structure planning

Planning your website structure is good for SEO. It ensures that everything is arranged in a hierarchy. It helps Google crawlers or bots to crawl and navigate the site.

Just like an organisational structure, plan the structure of your website. For example, at the top will be your home page. The next will be your category pages and then the post pages. For example, if you are writing on students categories on the site will be students, males, females, and posts will be male dormitories, sports, clothes, and the same for the females, though they will come under the different categories as indicated in the image below:

Headings and sub-headings should have the appropriate sizes and written with keywords accordingly.

There is a need to understand how you will like your content to be structured. Visualise it as you write your posts and correct those you have done already. Group them in a hierarchy according to the headings and subheadings, and separate the posts into various categories. This is also called a silo structure.

Website structure diagram

Few categories should be used for ease of navigation and to be easy to locate. The idea is to add a new page to existing categories or add new categories created with its attendant new pages. Ensure that your posts and pages are consistently, rather than randomly linked. Site links naturally occur in SERPs when your site structure is good or strong.

Internal Linking and SEO

Related to good site structure is internal linking of blog posts. This means that for one category namely students, you can answer all search queries through your posts on classrooms, class period, or subjects. Then you interlink the posts together. This is known as internal linking. This shows the search engines that your topics are related when looking at the whole content of the website, and articles.

The URL structure of a website

A good site structure also affects the URL structure of the site. When you register for a domain, the resulting URL is just the first step. When you create menus, categories, and posts, these are added to the URL in the search results. This is done in the WordPress dashboard under settings < permalinks

The URL of a post will be https://www.abc.com/students/males where students are the category and males is the postname or title.

You will agree with me that all this shows how categories and posts are arranged for one to follow the other in a logical manner. Just imagine what will happen if this is left out or done haphazardly; Google will not understand what the site is about, making it difficult to rank.

The usual practice is to remove stop words like ‘, the’, ‘or’, ‘a’, ‘and’ etc. to keep the post title simple, short, and understandable to readers. You can do that by editing it right under the post title in the WordPress editor as indicated in the image below.

The Role of Tags in WordPress

WordPress Tags help group posts that are similar in detail. Tags can be found below a post, as in the image below:

"<yoastmark

Tags are added to a post by typing them in the add new tag box, on the right side of the post editor. Several tags can be added to a post based on existing posts, though not every post will have a unique tag. It is normal to group several posts with a few tags.

The difference between categories and tags is that categories are generally used to group related posts together. There can also be sub-categories of the main categories; whilst tags are like an index of words on your site. Tags help posts and categories to be found by the search engines.

The XML Sitemap

An XML site map also helps Google crawlers go through the content on your site. It is one of the first things to install either through a plugin or through the Yoast SEO plugin. A new site with few pages of content benefits from a sitemap in that, Google crawlers crawl a Sitemap and index it whether the content is a lot or not. An XML Sitemap is not meant to be seen by people whilst an HTML sitemap is both hidden but can be searched for.

If you are using the Yoast SEO plugin, go to Yoast<SEO<General Page Features tab and scroll down to ‘XML Sitemap’ select it. Alternatively, use a sitemap plugin obtained from the WordPress plugins folder for the purpose.

Now you know what steps to take as far as your website structure is concerned, to enable it found by the search engines. If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment, and share it.

Useful Facts about Website Traffic and Audience