I was recently asked to be a part of a podcast created by Purely Hosting where we talked about what website traffic is and why it’s so important.  Purely Hosting is one of the world’s leading web hosting companies, specializing in shared hosting solutions for business and personal sites.  You can find them on the web at http://purelyhosting.com, follow them on Twitter or friend them on Facebook.

If you recall, we recently ran a series of posts that talked about the different types of website traffic and the differences between them:

• Website Analytics – Your Traffic Sources
• Website Analytics – Search Traffic
• Website Analytics – Referral Traffic

Following is the video podcast that we recorded.  It includes my piece (up until about 3:30 in the video) as well as a great discussion on what website traffic is, why it’s so important and some potential ways Purely Hosting can help you get some additional traffic to your site.  If you’ve go any questions and how you can set up your site for success on the web (IE, getting more traffic!) contact us today!

Video Transcription

Well hello out there welcome to our podcast.  And today’s podcast is going to be about Internet traffic.  And why if you have a website, Internet traffic is very, very important.  But why take that from me?  What you should do is take it from an expert out here.  So what I’m going to do is, we’ve set up a meeting with Greg Bellan.  And Greg Bellan is the owner of KTC Digital and he’s an Internet traffic and SEO guru.  So let’s hear it from him instead of hearing it from me. So here you go…

So Greg… What is this website traffic?

Well let’s see.  Website traffic is the number of people that are actually coming to your website.  In analtyics packages is is tracked, you’ll see numbers such as visitors, visits and views to your website.  So basically all the people that are actually coming to your website and checking out the content that you have.

Perfect, perfect.  We want to set this up a little bit for people so they’re not wondering what this whole website traffic is.  A lot of people think “traffic” like cars but that explains it perfectly thank you.  Now the next question I have for you is: Why is traffic important to a website?

Well obviously, anytime you’re building something on the web, obviously you’ve got something to say.  And so traffic is basically a representation of how good or bad your website is doing.  It’s one measure to see how many people you’re reaching, how many people your message is reaching.

Perfect, perfect.  That makes it nice and simple. The next question and the last question, we’re going to make this nice and short for you, I know you’re a busy guy and you’ve got to get back to your SEO and your website traffic and all the great things that you do so we’ll make this short for you.  The last question I have is: Can traffic help your website rank in the major search engines?

Yeah, it absolutely can.  It is one of many ranking factors that search engines such as Google or Bing or Yahoo use in their algorithms.  But absolutely, if all other things are equal, if you’ve got two sites, the one with the most traffic is probably going to be the one that’s going to rank higher in the search engines.  And that’s because the search engine, again such as Google, Yahoo or Bing, they’re trying to return the most relevant results to the user, and they’ll look at website traffic as one of those ranking factors.

Well fantastic Greg.  Thank you for taking a few minutes to talk with us.  We greatly appreciate it.  Our customer are going to really enjoy this and is there anything else you’d like to add to new website owners, getting traffic and pushing traffic to your website?

I guess I would just want to reiterate what Google says, just be good and put out good, interesting content.  That really is going to make you rank higher in the search engines and it’s going to make people want to come back to your site which is going to result in more traffic.

Fantastic Greg, thank you so much.

Well there you have it. Word straight from the mouth of  a traffic and SEO expert that traffic is very important for your website.

Thanks to the folks at Purely Hosting for giving me the opportunity to be a part of their podcast!