Behind every failed website was a dream, an idea, plenty of work and a passionate site creator. Why do some sites get the traffic while others remain unvisited and buried at the bottom of the search result pile? Sites that become successful first get visibility from search engines then keep visitors engaged once they get there.

This is the million dollar question and one that won't be answered by one single person, but can absolutely be answered by your visitors reaction to your site. Here are some questions to ask:

• Where do visitors drop off your site?
• Will rearranging your page order increase sales and visiting time?
• Are visitors following the path you laid out on the site?

Before you build your site, you should have a “path” that you want customers to travel through. This will depend on the overall goal of your website. Your goal might be to sell products, sell information, build an opt-in mailing list, build community, or a combination of these.

It’s not likely that any of these things will truly be achieved with one page, so you will need to create multiple pages to build desire for and reinforce your intended goal. If visitors never take the first step down your path then your site surely won’t reach its intended goal. It may be that customers travel all the way through your site, reach the call to action and then drop off.

Either way, that begins with understanding where visitors go and where they leave. Without this critical piece of information you may apply the wrong cure based on your perceived diagnosis. I If you decide to lower your price but your visitors are never getting past the home page, this won’t do much good and you’ll have sold yourself short on your profits.

To truly understand how visitors react to your site it is critical to have a web analytics tool such that documents each page that a visitor has seen and the order in which they traveled through your site. We Chose to offer Traffic Facts as it is by far one the most comprehensive tools for the value of $4/month. When you find problem areas, you can begin making changes by tweaking details on the page.

The entire problem may be that visitors are confused by the wording. You can try different ways of rephrasing the same message until you find the one that gets the most favorable results. A good stats program combined with content management website like Easy Website Builder will help you to fine to your site one area at a time until you see the results you want. If others can achieve favorable results, there is no reason why any site cannot achieve the same results.

nGenuity Solutions is committed to helping small businesses become successful in the ever changing online world. Drop us a lineif you've got an internet business success story, a horror story, or are just plain frustrated and have a question. With your permission, we will post your story below the article so that others can learn from your experiences!

Christine Harrell is a small business internet marketing consultant and the cofounder of nGenuity Solutions. nG's flagship product Easy Website Buildergives small businesses the necessary tools to build profitable websites through real time visitor analysis and push-button web publishing.

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