Increasing traffic to a blog is a lot about being able to read and understand your statistics. So, how do you do it?

Recording Your Blog Traffic Statistics
First of all you need some way of recording and reporting back to you your traffic statistics. But, the problem is, that some of the time you will doubt the figures. That unexpected day when you have received no traffic, or a huge traffic blip. Are they for real, or are they errors in the reports?

For this reason it is good to use two traffic packages together. And the pairing I use and recommend start with Google’s Analytics. Sign up for a Google Account then to Analytics and install their code. The problem is that you can be overwhelmed with information, they record so much. But you get a lot of detail and it is stored a long time.

I partner this with WP-Stats. A simple plugin to install and activate, you just need the API key. This provides real time monitoring of your visitors showing the information that you need on a daily basis on a single report page. Works a treat!

Visitors And Hits
Now that you have your statistics, you can start monitoring visitors and hits along with search engine keyword terms and visited pages.

There is a big difference between page hits and visitors. Ideally, both are high, but 1 visitor can look at several pages and create several page hits in a visit, day or a longer time period. Ideally you want your visitors looking at many pages as it shows that your content is interesting and you are building up regular readers.

So, a high ratio of page views to visitors is ideal. But you also want a good number of daily unique visitors as this represents the new people visiting your website.

Well Read Post Pages
Have a look at the pages that are regularly read. Are they being found through searches or are visitors finding them by browsing the site? If some posts are very well read, make sure that the navigation of every page makes these easy to find. This way, not only will visitors be more likely to see the popular material, these posts will also be highlighted to the search engines, who might then rank them better.

Review Keyword Terms
Lastly for now, look through the search engine keyword terms to see what terms are sending you traffic. Could you write new, better posts that are directly related to these terms? Could you do some link building on these terms to make sure that your site is performing well on all search engines, not just on those sending your visitors?

By taking some time to look through and understand your traffic statistics you can be gently remodelling your website so that you are increasing the number of new visitors that arrive each day and increasing the number of pages that they are each reading.

With a little bit of time and effort, your traffic statistics will increase and your blog’s popularity will go sky high.

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