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Identify and Reach Your Target Audience Through Link Popularity Analysis

Suppose you've made a website for a desktop publishing company. Your site has been advertised and you are sure it will be a hit. But, here is the rub: you need to make sure people see your website, so you must determine the demographic you should target with future advertising. How do you do this? The answer lies in statistics.

Identifying Site Traffic

There are many ways to find out how many people visit your site. If you simply want to know how many people have viewed your site since its creation, a simple hit counter will suffice. If you want to know more detailed information, however, you need more advanced software.

Some free hosts come with usage statistics options already available, but most charge money for it. In addition, hosting costs can get rather high. In fact, a more popular company might charge $75 per month of hosting for a gigabyte of storage. This usually isn’t too high of a price for large businesses, but it might serve as a deterrent for private usage or small businesses.

Even if your website is non-commercial in nature, advanced statistics can help you see how your site is growing compared to your vision. Most advanced statistics software can show you things like bandwidth usage, percent of disk space remaining, and which browsers are used by your audience. It can also help you identify what you need to add or delete in order to make your site more popular. Although, for that use, a poll would be more effective.

Bandwidth Usage

Bandwidth usage is a major factor in evaluating the growth of your website. It is basically a measure of data transferred between your server and the client who is using your website. Most companies offer a limited amount of bandwidth monthly. If you exceed your monthly quota, the company disables your website, causing downtime. This can really interfere with your attempts to build a popular website.

In order to handle bandwidth consumption problems – an unavoidable problem as your website grows – many website owners create mirrors. These are identical copies of your website stored on a different server. They then create a gateway page that allows you to switch mirrors.

Disk Space

Another limiting factor in website growth is disk space. All hosts – even paid hosts – have a quota on how much space you can use for your website. You will be unable to add content after exceeding the quota. As a result, you will have to move some information to a sister site or move your whole website – a much more common solution that, unfortunately, eventually works you into a corner. But, with free hosts now offering 1 gigabyte of storage, it should take awhile of that to happen to most people.

Browsers

Browsers are an interesting problem for web developers. At first glance, no problem should exist. After all, they take you to the same place and serve the same purpose. While browsing the Internet, however, your browser can drastically impact your experience. While most comply with certain standards, Internet Explorer – the default Windows web browser – does not comply with these standards. This means there are two standards on the Internet – Internet Explorer's standards and those of the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. As a result, developers have to either develop separate websites with a gateway linking them or select one to focus on and ignore the other.

Depending on your selection, this will impact who can view your website. To counteract this, a web developer could use browser statistics to determine which browser web users commonly use to access their site, and therefore determine the standards that would be most practical to use.

Translations

One could use link popularity statistics to determine which translations to add if possible. For example, if many connections come from Spanish-speaking countries, you already have a potential audience to expand to. You cannot, however, get that audience without porting the site in Spanish. Without the statistics, you would not even be aware of the trend. In cases where you use the site for profit, such as per-hit payment services, this adaptation is very important.

Operating System

You can also, in some cases, determine which operating system your users use. Contrary to popular belief, Windows is not the only one – nor is it the most reliable. Identifying the operating system is useful if you provide software downloads or run a multimedia distribution site since not all operating systems can run all software.

Link popularity analysis may be one of the more effective demographic-surveying systems available. A good web developer, however, would not use it in lieu of surveys. Rather, they should be used in conjunction with them in order to figure out the site's current audience. Figuring that out is the key to owning a successful site that will survive for a long time.