The amount of data sent and received by visitors to a website is known as web traffic, which constitutes a large portion of Internet traffic. The number of visitors and the number of pages visited determine the web traffic. The incoming and outgoing traffic are monitored by the sites that find which parts or pages of the site are popular and feel the trend.

The web traffic is monitored in many ways and the data that are gathered are helpful to structure sites. The web traffic can be increased by including search engines and through search engine optimization.

The amount of traffic seen by a website shows the measure of its popularity and so can be used to see the shortcomings, if any, and concentrate on improving those areas. In this way, it is possible to increase the popularity of a web site and the number of people visiting that particular web site.

However, it is sometimes imperative to safeguard some parts of the website by a password, by which only authorized people can visit particular sections or pages. At times, based on geographical location too, specific traffic may be blocked. Depending upon the number of connections and bandwidth too, the access to a web server can be limited.

There are many ways of increasing web site traffic. Placement of a site in search engines, purchase of advertising like bulk e-mail, Pop- up ads and in-page advertisements are some of them. The increase in web traffic can also be achieved by purchasing non-Internet based advertising.

It is quite important to get proper placement on search engines because if a web page is not listed in the first pages of a search, the chances are less to find it in the subsequent pages, as most people do not have a tendency to go past the first page. The other ways of increasing web traffic are offering e books or articles and classified advertisements, web rings and building link popularity, of which the last mentioned is the easiest.

Popularity can be built by writing e-mails to sites and asking for a link. Or else, written material can be sent to e- zines or free article sites, which accept them for free. But the benefit for the writer is that it may bring traffic to the website.

Generally, web traffic can be increased by registering with the major search engines that follow the hyper links to get to pages inside the web site, index it and store in the database. When too much web traffic occurs, it slows down the access to a web site because more file requests go to the server than it can handle-which may be due to over popularity or an intentional attack on the site, which usually happens to small web sites rather than larger scale web sites.