A while back, I wrote a post on Why Using Google Analytics Is A Bad Idea. Rather than me reiterating what I said in that post, basically if you install Google Analytics code on your site, you are giving Google a back door window into your traffic patterns and they will quickly determine that your (affiliate) site is not the kind of site they want in their index.

Open Source Web Analytics Software

So you have to use an alternative. One alternative I’ve been trying out is Piwik (I’ve no idea what the name means or signifies) – an open source alternative to Google Analytics (open source means that it’s completely free to download and use).

The Piwik Dashboard. Click the image to go to the live Piwik Demo

It’s a PHP script that you install on one of your domains. Installation is pretty straightforward but you may need a bit of technical know-how if installation doesn’t run smoothly.

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Every website stands or falls on the traffic it receives, regardless of the tool you use to build the site.

A first step is to submit your site’s sitemap to the search engines (SiteBuilder Elite does this for you) but it is only a first step. You can also submit sitemaps through Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The search engines love active sites (especially Google); that doesn’t just mean the number of new pages added to a site on a regular basis, but the number of inbound links to the site. If a site keeps getting new inbound links (links from other sites pointing to it), then it must be popular, and that’s reflected in the page rankings in the search engines. Higher page ranks mean higher positions in the search engines and more traffic coming to your sites through natural searches.

However, getting traffic isn’t enough. You need the right kind of traffic and you need to give that traffic some useful information. Basically, you should think of yourself and your sites as being in a service industry that provides information to people. The better the information, the more likely people will revisit and the greater the chance that they’ll buy products or click ads listed on your site.

So if submitting a sitemap is just a first step, what other methods are available for getting traffic?

In this post, I’ll look at the free options (the next post will look at paid options):

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