One of the most interesting - and important - bits of information to find out about your website is how many visits it receives. Within the WebEden website making system there is a really simple tool called Sitecounter that lets you do this. Sitecounter also displays the number of visits a website has recieved to all those people visiting it. You can add Sitecounter to your website in just a few moments. Follow the instructions below:

Have a go adding a Sitecounter and leave us a comment

HitWise UK, the online website traffic measurement company, have just published some great website statistics for 2008. Its all about the top websites, with the highest traffic, the ones with the most visitors; and all that kind of thing.

Its useful to see who is being really successful at generating traffic to their website, since you can try and emulate the way they’ve generated success.

First off, its clothes shops. UK internet traffic to online clothes shops went up almost 18% between February 2008 and February 2009. This website category now makes up 1 in every 10 visits on online shops.

Here’s the top 10

1. www.next.co.uk
2. www.asos.com
3. www.topshop.com
4. www.riverisland.com
5. www.newlook.com
6. www.mandmdirect.com
7. www.dorothyperkins.co.uk
8. www.mothercare.com
9. www.monsoon.co.uk
10. www.jdsports.co.uk

Food and drink websites are also booming in the UK, due to the economic climate, since more people are looking to entertain at home.

Here’s the top ones:

1. www.bbc.co.uk/food
2. uktv.co.uk/food
3. www.deliaonline.com
4. www.waitrose.com
5. www.bbcgoodfood.com
6. www.channel4.com/food
7. www.qype.co.uk
8. www.jamieoliver.com
9. www.laithwaites.co.uk
10. www.sugarvine.com

The economic downturn and improved online services has also resulted in a 13% increase in traffic to Government websites.

Again, here’s the top 10:

1. www.metoffice.gov.uk
2. www.direct.gov.uk
3. www.jobcentreplus.gov.uk
4. www.hmrc.gov.uk
5. www.nhs.uk
6. www.dvla.gov.uk
7. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk
8. www.opsi.gov.uk
9. www.dsa.gov.uk
10. www.standards.dfes.gov.uk

Is your website one of the the top 10 in your market? Even if you already are, take a look at the keywords your most successful competitors are targeting, and make sure you are using them too. As we showed you in our Search Engine Optimisation guide, its really easy to use the WebEden Sitebuilder to change your keywords. Any comments, please leave them below.

What is the biggest story in the world? The most well known, the one we’re all interested in, one that will be handed down from parent to child throughout the ages?

Is it the birth of Jesus? Or a biblical classic such as Noah’s Ark? What about something a bit closer to home: 1066 and all that? The battle of Britain? The story of England winning the world cup?

If you let Internet traffic answer this question, you’ll get an answer you didn’t expect.

The financial crisis has sparked an unprecedented interest in financial news. The Financial Times website FT.com has reported a 300 per cent growth in page views since the start of 2008.

And the BBC’s business pages recorded an all time peak after reports of the collapse of Lehman Brothers broke. The story headed ‘Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy got more than 1.9 million page views, which makes it the most popular story since the launch of the website.

OK, maybe not the greatest story ever told, but one thing is for sure: If you want more traffic on your site, makes sure you build a website that includes the latest financial bad news!

On average, almost half of all traffic that arrives on a website comes through search engines. This is according to recent research published by Internet traffic measurement company Hitwise UK.

Whilst in January 2008 search engines contributed 37.1% of total traffic to websites, by January 2009 this had climbed to a whopping 40.5%.

Here’s a graph from HitWise:

Apart from anything, this shows that if you want more visitors to your website, you need to make sure that your website appears high up in the search engine results page (SERPs). Read our guide to search engine optimisation to boost your website up the SERPs.

The dominance of search engines in website traffic is a huge opportunity for small businesses. Big brands used to be able to dominate the media landscape. What small company has the money to buy advertising on television, in national newspapers or in glossy magazines? But when it comes to search engines the game has changed. You don’t need big  budgets to reach out to potential customers, just an understanding of how search works, and a product or service that people want.

The flip side is that search has made it harder for large companies to ‘own’ consumer interest. Just because you’re a big brand it doesn’t mean you’re going to appear high in the search results. And spending lots of money on search doesn’t necessarily mean lots of traffic. A well optimised website of a small business or an individual will beat a poorly optimised big company website every time.

Just search for a common household product and you’ll see that the results page is full of unknown websites and unknown brands. None of these could afford to buy airtime of on TV. Before search engines, how would these brands have been able to reach potential customers?

The other interesting information arising from this research is the way in which we are now using search engines. 90% of the top 1,500 terms were brand specific. This means that people are using search engines to navigate the web, rather than typing a website’s address directly into the address bar. That’s the same sort of user behviour as seen in Japan, where people almost always use search engines rather than type in a domain name.

Do you a have a big budget competitor that you’ve managed to beat in the SERPs, using the WebEden website making tool? Leave us a comment below.

Whilst you’re busy building websites, have you ever wondered how big the Internet is? How many websites, domains and how many pages? The reality is that it’s quite difficult to measure, so all figures are an estimate.

What’s for certain is that it’s growing – if you look at domain sales alone, the number of Top Level Domains went up by 16% in 2008 to 177,000,000.

One of the best assessments come from a company called Netcraft, who produce (amongst lots of other interesting research) a monthly ‘Web Server Survey’.

Each month Netcraft send out ‘requests’ to every website and server on the Internet, asking for a small bit of information to be returned to them.

In February they had responses from a 215,675,903 websites. ‘Woah, that’s a lot of Internet then’ you might say! True, but what’s really amazing is how many more sites that is from the previous month. There were more than 30 million more than January, a growth of more than 16%.

Lots of this growth can be pinpointed to China, thanks to a service called ‘Qzone’. This is the Chinese equivalent of MSN Messenger. Qzone have added a blogging service to their messenger client, and the 20 million sites that they serve mean that they are now the biggest single provider of blog sites, eclipsing Blogger and Windows Live spaces.

Here’s a graph showing the growth of active websites from August 1995 to February 2009, from Netcraft.

So is the Internet growing? Too right!