Why is it important to understand your visitors

If you want to make it big on the internet, by just building a website or blog with nice contents is just not enough. Traffic plays the most important part of your blog. Even if you have huge traffic coming to your site doesn't necessary make you successful. Well, even if you are successful, how are you able to bring it to the next level? By understanding your visitors.

I'm sure most webmasters out there understands this well better than I do. If you get to know your visitors and understand what they want and provide them with what they are looking for, they will definitely come back to your site. Not only do they come back, in most cases, they may bring their friends along.

So, how are you able to understand your visitors without interacting with them? Yes you may include a little poll or survey and ask your visitors to participate. But 70% of the time they don't. Let's look at the alternative method. There are plenty of free tools and software out there which you can install on your website to track visitor activities without them feeling intrusive. For example, SiteMeter, SiteCounter, Feedjit, just to name a few. These little graphical add-ons are not intrusive and silently provide very useful statistics for you. You get to know where your visitors come from, what keywords they searched for before they found you, what topics interest them, how long do they spend on your site and so on.

Over the years, these tools have become more and more sophisticated. They are able to track IP addresses, ISPs and even able to integrate with Google Earth to show location of where they come from - precisely to the street level. Here's an example I captured with the tool to show where my visitor came from.


With this information at hand, you are able to make changes to your site or add contents that may appeal to your visitors. If your visitor lives nearby your place, heck you could even pay them a nice visit. Though not necessary, this serves as an invaluable information for every webmasters.

Based on the information gathered over the past couple of months, I've had a huge amount of traffic coming into my site looking for information regarding a specific topic. For that reason I have decided to create a separate website to target these visitors. Since the search engine has indexed your page for that particular niche, how are you able to send them to your new site? The answer is just to create a re-direct page to inform your visitors. Slowly, the search engines will pick up the trend and start sending visitors to your new site.