I'm looking for tools that can (1) track site traffic, and (2) increase site traffic. Does Winhost offer these, or can anyone suggest where I can find them, cheap? I seem to remember that Webtrends used to offer a scaled-down version for free, but I don't think that's true any more.
You can turn on SmarterStats from your control panel. Go to your Site Manager under the Site tab. This will allow you to monitor your site traffic. Now for increasing your traffic that is another thing. You'll need to start marketing your site. And one requirement is to provide good relevant content on your site or no one will think visiting your site is of value. With good content on your site, you can join other online forums, newsgroups, read blogs and add your posts and comments to contribute. Make sure to put signature files with links to your site. The other way is to pay for traffic with ads on google adwords...etc. This can be costly. Also, get business cards, stationary...etc with your url on it. Pass it around. I don't know what your site is about so that is some general info on how to generate some traffic.
Thanks, Curtis. Following your advice, for the first time (my site is new this week!), my site is about energy consumption data in the US. Please take a look at www.usenergydata.net. Back in the days when I used to program directly in HTML, I remember some way of inserting keywords into a site that made it easier for spiders and search engines to locate it. My site uses ASP.Net. Any suggestions about how to do this?
Well, there is the Meta tags - the Meta Description and Meta keyword tag. But pretty much all the major search engines have stopped indexing the Meta keyword tag. I'd say use it but don't spend too much time on it. What's more important is the Title tag of your pages. And use relevant keywords as html text in your web site.
you have to optimize your site and submit to major search engines like google, yahoo, etc. also, you must market your website as well. but beware of stuffing too much keywords, that might worked good before, but try it now, it doesn't work much.
