I come from a place in the Philippines where enduring the metropolitan traffic, especially during the rush hours, is a fact of life to be accepted. And don’t get me started on the traffic situation here in the metro during special occasions – say, the Valentine traffic rush last night. With all the time we spend on traffic, many manhours are lost to unproductivity.


On the other hand, with websites and online presence, traffic is not exactly a bad thing. In fact it is one of the goals that any website owner aims for – for his website to attract the greatest amount of traffic.

People build websites because they have some information that they want to share. If there is no traffic to the websites that they build, it means that nobody is visiting those websites. Thus the information that is meant to be shared from those websites are not being seen and read by other people.

What’s the use the information you intend to share from your website if nobody gets to read it?

That is how important online traffic is.

Website Rankings

So what does traffic have to do with Search Engine Optimization?

As discussed in my previous blog entry, it is the goal of SEO to place a website page at the top results of a search targeting particular keywords. If web searchers search the internet using a particular keyword, and your website appears on the top of the results (or at the first page, at least), there is a higher probability that the person searching would get to see the link to your website and click on it.

Of course, anyone who searches the internet using these search engines know that there is no assurance that even if your website appears as the very first entry in the results, that the searcher would click your link and get to visit your website.

But what we are talking about here is the probability. The higher your website ranking in the search results, the higher the probability that people would click on your link. And inversely, the lower your page ranking, the less chances that people would visit your site. And that probability decreases considerably if your website appears on the second page of the search results.

And if your website appears consistently in website rankings for searches using related keywords, your website would project the image that it is an authority in that particular subject.

Website Page Ranking And Authority

Consider this. For example, your website is about hybrid cars. And you aim your SEO campaign for your website to rank for keywords related to hybrid cars. And your website appears on the first page of searches whenever someone searches these keywords:

advantages of hybrid cars
history of hybrid cars
hybrid cars savings
hybrid cars vs. conventional cars
types of hybrid cars
fuel efficiency of hybrid cars

When a person researching about hybrid cars consistently sees your domain appearing in the search results of the keywords that he is searching, he would most likely think that your website is an authority on the subject matter of hybrod cars. And so, the chances that he would visit your website to see and read your content increases even further.

And the more times that your website appears in various keyword searches about a particular subject, the more traffic that is likely to be funneled to your website. And the more traffic your website gets, it means that more visitors get to read your content.

Incoming search terms:

• website visit rankings