Guess how many hits I am getting

[lovemark]

Please take a look at my site Mark's Interactive pages and guess how many hits I am getting in total per day. I can tell you that my football pages which are quite unique are the most popular followed by my "Words of Wisdom" pages which have a lot of content.

The reason why I am asking this question is to see if you think I deserve more visitors than I am getting, so that I can do something about it.

[ashukairy]

Okay, I don't want to be harsh by no means, but I need state the truth as I see it. I don't believe you are getting much traffic to your pages. The pages are poorly designed. Additionally, I can't imagine anybody giving you their name and e-mail address. How is your conversion rate? To see better results you need to redesign your site, give potential clients more incentive to sign up with your free service, help the visitor sense security, and give off a more professional aura.

[lovemark]

Originally Posted by ashukairy

Okay, I don't want to be harsh by no means, but I need state the truth as I see it. I don't believe you are getting much traffic to your pages. The pages are poorly designed. Additionally, I can't imagine anybody giving you their name and e-mail address. How is your conversion rate? To see better results you need to redesign your site, give potential clients more incentive to sign up with your free service, help the visitor sense security, and give off a more professional aura.

Thank you for for honesty. How would better designing a page help people find it in the first place? I am not asking for names or e-mail addresses on my football pages, just on my interactive pages if they want me to include their names. Otherwise no name is needed and there is never any sign up or registration involved.
I am not a professional. I have made the site myself. How many visitors a day do you think I am getting and in what way would redesigning help attract new people?

[ashukairy]

I think you may be getting close to 20 visitors a day. But what's your bounce and exit rates? How many people view your site for only 1 - 3 seconds and then leave?

Your sole purpose is mere entertainment, is that correct? If that is so, the design, copy, attractiveness of the site has a lot to do with getting more visitors to come. For a site like yours, the "conversion" is measured by how many people take part in the various interactive activities you have available to them. If few people do that then you should realize that the site is going nowhere. If you do not give your visitors a good reason to stay and participate then they'll be outta there faster than you can say football.

My suggestion is to capitalize on what you are offering. Your site has a purpose and you need to think how can I maximize the conversion and how do I measure conversion? Seeing things from a visitors perspective is crucial; sure to you the site looks great and heck! you're offering a free service and free entertainment. But what's the point if nobody is interested in delving in further to the site. You have only seconds to convince the visitor to take some sort of action, to go further, and to see what your site is all about. Within seconds you can lose them, probably forever.

I don't know if this is even relevant to what you have intended for this site. BUt as it stands, even if you have traffic coming, i don't believe they are staying.

[incrediblehelp]

I guess I don't understand this exercise. Why should we guess your traffic levels?

[stevealmond]

Originally Posted by lovemark

Please take a look at my site Mark's Interactive pages and guess how many hits I am getting in total per day. I can tell you that my football pages which are quite unique are the most popular followed by my "Words of Wisdom" pages which have a lot of content.

The reason why I am asking this question is to see if you think I deserve more visitors than I am getting, so that I can do something about it.

Hi Mark,

I visited your site because you asked me to in your post. I woudn't have visited it otherwise. The football pages which you say are your most popular are the pages that would be of most interest to me. However apart from international leage rankings and a javascript banner running headlines there is no content. There is no unique information on your site and nothing to keep me there. In a search there are more authoritive sites that will be found e.g. FIFA, EUFA, FA, etc. These sites provide a wealth of information that you will never be able to beat, unless you can provide day to day gossip and breaking news.

In answer to your question and with the content that you currently have on your site, I am sorry to have to say that the answer is no. Change the content, keep it up todate, keep it relevant and unique, and my answer may well be yes.

Sorry to be negative.

Regards

Steve

[lovemark]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

I guess I don't understand this exercise. Why should we guess your traffic levels?

I would just like to know what kind of traffic I should be expecting so that I can compare it to the actual hits I'm getting.

[incrediblehelp]

I am sorry but no one can predict traffic levels except for the SE's. If you had a list of keywords that you are targeting you can do some guesstimations with Wordtracker or Google AdWords.

[lovemark]

Originally Posted by ashukairy

I think you may be getting close to 20 visitors a day. But what's your bounce and exit rates? How many people view your site for only 1 - 3 seconds and then leave?

Your sole purpose is mere entertainment, is that correct? If that is so, the design, copy, attractiveness of the site has a lot to do with getting more visitors to come. For a site like yours, the "conversion" is measured by how many people take part in the various interactive activities you have available to them. If few people do that then you should realize that the site is going nowhere. If you do not give your visitors a good reason to stay and participate then they'll be outta there faster than you can say football.

My suggestion is to capitalize on what you are offering. Your site has a purpose and you need to think how can I maximize the conversion and how do I measure conversion? Seeing things from a visitors perspective is crucial; sure to you the site looks great and heck! you're offering a free service and free entertainment. But what's the point if nobody is interested in delving in further to the site. You have only seconds to convince the visitor to take some sort of action, to go further, and to see what your site is all about. Within seconds you can lose them, probably forever.

I don't know if this is even relevant to what you have intended for this site. BUt as it stands, even if you have traffic coming, i don't believe they are staying.

It's true that some visitors spend a very short time there. With the football rankings a lot of people just want to see how their team are doing and a few other team. Some people like to spend time reading my jokes and quotes. They can spend half an hour there, but that doesn't happen so often. When I myself go to a site full of joke, I don't read more than 4-5 jokes no matter how pretty the page looks.
I used to get quotes sent to my "words of wisdom" pages almost every day when I started it about 10 years ago and was using the space allocated to me by my Internet provider, but since buying my own domain I would be lucky to get one a month. I don't know why.
I understand what you are saying about the length of time people spend on my site, but I think I would rather increase the number of visitors because if 1 out of every 100 visitors spends time on my site, then if I can get 10000 instead of 100 I would be getting 100 people staying instead of 1. As I am not selling anything, it's just nice to know that my site is being viewed in some remote parts of the world and by lots of people.
I can tell you that the number is higher than your guess, but I would like to reach more people.

[lovemark]

Originally Posted by stevealmond

Hi Mark,

I visited your site because you asked me to in your post. I woudn't have visited it otherwise. The football pages which you say are your most popular are the pages that would be of most interest to me. However apart from international leage rankings and a javascript banner running headlines there is no content. There is no unique information on your site and nothing to keep me there. In a search there are more authoritive sites that will be found e.g. FIFA, EUFA, FA, etc. These sites provide a wealth of information that you will never be able to beat, unless you can provide day to day gossip and breaking news.

In answer to your question and with the content that you currently have on your site, I am sorry to have to say that the answer is no. Change the content, keep it up todate, keep it relevant and unique, and my answer may well be yes.

Sorry to be negative.

Regards

Steve

Hi Steve,
actually FIFA is the only official body that does football rankings, but if you put Football Rankings in google search, my page comes up first, so if you were interested in football rankings you would probably have visited my page if you use google. I can't really add any content to that page because it's not a gossip page, it's all about the rankings which is quite unique. If I write other things I could be competing with the BBC or CNN etc and would have to do this as a full time job. The ranking pages are updated frequently.
My other pages are less popular but there is so much content that search engines would probably find some sentences from my pages. Is there anything else I can do to get more hits? What about changing the meta tags?

[seo4china]

The problem is not getting visitors to your site or having huge traffic, but what you can deliver in terms of value for them once they arrive at your site. And if they don't see that value at first look you bet they will leave immediately.

[lovemark]

Originally Posted by seo4china

The problem is not getting visitors to your site or having huge traffic, but what you can deliver in terms of value for them once they arrive at your site. And if they don't see that value at first look you bet they will leave immediately.

I think the more people who visit my interactive pages the more content I will get for those pages which will make my site even better.

[noel_x99]

The reason why I am asking this question is to see if you think I deserve more visitors than I am getting, so that I can do something about it.

I'm not sure if you meant this the way that it sounded. But no one "deserves" visitors. You earn visitors by attracting them with good content and well researched keyword phrases and then offering them a reason to come back.

Putting it behind a signup form doesn't count for much. Give them enough that they know they want to sign up. People are VERY skeptical of handing out their email address. I know I don't do it even if I "might be" interested in what they are giving away. I have to KNOW that I want what they offer before they get my email address.

If you don't give them a taste of what's available, you won't get anyone to sign up.

[lovemark]

Originally Posted by noel_x99

I'm not sure if you meant this the way that it sounded. But no one "deserves" visitors. You earn visitors by attracting them with good content and well researched keyword phrases and then offering them a reason to come back.

Putting it behind a signup form doesn't count for much. Give them enough that they know they want to sign up. People are VERY skeptical of handing out their email address. I know I don't do it even if I "might be" interested in what they are giving away. I have to KNOW that I want what they offer before they get my email address.

If you don't give them a taste of what's available, you won't get anyone to sign up.

We may say that a person is being "overpaid" or "underpaid" for the work he/she is doing. This means that we think that person deserves to get paid more, or less as the case may be.
If you come across a site which you find very interesting, useful etc, and find that only a few people a day are visiting this site, you may well think that it's a pity more people are not aware of it. In other words the site "deserves" more visitors. You may use another word, but I used the word "deserve".
Most people give their e-mail addresses when joining a forum, submitting their site to a directory, or using services such as e-bay etc. I guess you gave your e-mail address to join this forum. My page does not offer any sign up facilities and no e-mail address is necessary. If you want your name to be included on my page as the sender, I need an e-mail address which I will not publish if they write (secret) after the address. If they don't give their e-mail address I will publish what they have sent without any name.
You mentioned "well researched keyword phrases". Do you mean in my meta tag or in the content of my pages? I'm afraid I know nothing about keywords. Maybe you can give me some tips. Thanks!

[noel_x99]

Most people give their e-mail addresses when joining a forum, submitting their site to a directory, or using services such as e-bay etc. I guess you gave your e-mail address to join this forum. My page does not offer any sign up facilities and no e-mail address is necessary.

Ahhh...but I lurked in this forum for a month or more and learned all sorts of things before I gave my email address. I'd do the same on other forums too. I can browse all I want on ebay without giving them info. I only need to give my email address when I decide I want to buy or sell.

It seems to me that on you site everything I clicked on wanted me to give an email address FIRST.

For keywords research start with some free tools like Google's Adwords Keyword tool. Try to figure out what phrases people are searching for and make sure you use those words on your page - in good useful content.

[lovemark]

Originally Posted by noel_x99

Ahhh...but I lurked in this forum for a month or more and learned all sorts of things before I gave my email address. I'd do the same on other forums too. I can browse all I want on ebay without giving them info. I only need to give my email address when I decide I want to buy or sell.

It seems to me that on you site everything I clicked on wanted me to give an email address FIRST.

For keywords research start with some free tools like Google's Adwords Keyword tool. Try to figure out what phrases people are searching for and make sure you use those words on your page - in good useful content.

I've made changes to my pages as you and most other people who have been kind enough to give their opinions seem to think that e-mail could be an issue. What do you think?
I'll have a look into keyword, but don't you think that there is more competition for popular keywords? Perhaps if I use a less common keyword, my pages would be among the first to be found.