The amount of traffic determined in a particular website will show its popularity over other sites. By evaluating the statistics of visitors, there is a possibility of locating the shortcomings of the site and improving it. This will encourage more visitors to view the site.

Nevertheless, it also needs necessary protection against harmful elements in the Internet. Therefore, in addition to encouraging site visitors, another factor to take care of is properly controlling the web traffic.

Limited Access

Most of the pages are accessible to the visitors. However, several sections need to be restricted, allowing only authorized people to visit such sections.

Examples of these sites are for downloading different genre of files such as music and movie files. Some sites are requiring the visitor to have their registration be completed before accessing its pages.

In case of online viewing subscription, visitors must have their own user name and identification number or password in order to gain access to the site's pages. These kinds of sites are only allowing people who subscribed to their site's services.

Increasing Web Traffic

Either there are "off-limit" segments in a particular site or "pay per view" sections, the main purpose of web sites is to gain popularity to web visitors. Even there is limited access, site administrators still formulate strategies to increase web traffic.

One of these strategies is by placing the site in popular search engines and purchase of advertisements such as pop-ups and bulk e-mail messages.

The site must be placed in the first page of the search engine. Remember that once the visitor already found one in the first page, the percentage of browsing the subsequent pages is getting lower.

Aside from proper placement of the site in search engines, other things can increase its web traffic. One way is by offering free e-books or articles. It can be used to build some links directly to that site. This can be done by sending e-mail to similar sites and asking if it is willing to be linked in that particular site.

Another is by writing to e-zines or to free article sites. It will be of great help in establishing a popular link directly to that particular site.

Paid Advertisement

There are sites that prefer advertising on other popular sites. It is usually called e-marketing. It takes the form of the following:

• Banner advertising. In most pages bears different banners of other sites. It is sold in thousands, and referred to as cost per impression (CPM).

• Pay per clicks. These are keywords or key phrases that advertisers are providing to their clients. The visitors can only "click" and gain access to a particular page if he pays for it.

Pop-up advertisements are also form of advertising to attract more visitors in a site. However, most people consider it as a nuisance and bearers of different genres of viruses.

Traffic Overload

Too much web traffic can slow down or even facilitate total failure of access to a certain site. It is usually caused by huge volume of file requests going to the server than it can handle. It can annoy the visitors accessing to some vital information. It is a factor that every site administrator must be considered.

Aside from overloading, several programs force a particular site to close. One example is the denial of service attacks (DOS attacks). It works by attacking a computer system or network. It can result to loss of service to users.

It sends more requests in a site than the actual one it could handle. Viruses have also been used for large-scale DOS attacks.

A sudden explosion of publicity may also cause web traffic overload. Examples of these are quickly propagating e-mails and link from a popular site that can result to a sudden boost in visitors that overwhelms the site.

Some websites have been forced to close after sudden mass increase of traffic. The ones forced to close are particularly those run by individual charter the bandwidth from an Internet service provider or a hosting site.

There are also sites supported by large companies running such have also caught their own servers over popularity.

It is important that a site can handle possible web traffic problems. Anticipate its consequences or get the site close is the decision of the site administrator.