Walking backwards from goal means starting at end result. Find something that has already reached end result that you are after. Observe it and analyze what causes this end result, backtracking step by step from end result to where you are now. As you do so keep your feet on ground, that is, look at pure facts of matter. No hype, no "I hope" or "I think", no theories. Just pure facts from observation. Finally walk forward. Re-apply facts you discovered, step-by-step, without inventing or re-inventing anything. Follow blindly, no matter how silly or simple path you have uncovered may appear to be. And you will be guaranteed success as long as you are acting in same environment as one in which you observed your end result.

I have had opportunity to look at sites that have reasonably high traffic levels (our desired end result). Having a look at their server log files tells you exactly where traffic is coming from, stripped down to bare facts. Log files don't lie. The following truths emerge:

Fact (1): Most sites get a large proportion of their daily traffic from popular search engines. This is by far biggest traffic driver to most sites. Another large traffic driver is incoming links from other busy sites or from hundreds or thousands of small sites. It is usually hard to directly replicate a busy site's incoming links network so we won't dwell on this. Instead we will focus on what is easy, replicating a busy site's performance on search engine ranking across board. You will find that once your site is busy because of search engine traffic, your incoming links network will grow automatically as more people find your site and link to it. Higher numbers of incoming links (called link popularity) boost search engine rankings. It is a good vicious cycle that keeps itself growing - and you want that!

This high search engine traffic depends on following things:

Fact (2): The total number of pages site has. The more pages, higher traffic. Why? Think about it. Say your site has 10 pages only and each page draws in an average of about 7 visitors a day that find it on search engines. That's 70 visitors a day (10 pages x 7 visitors per page). If you now had 100 pages instead of similar nature, you would now have about 7 x 100 = 700 visitors a day instead of 70. Its that simple!

Fact (3): Basically, most sites get a trickle of traffic per page on their site. Each page manages to get found by only a relatively small number of people a day from search engines, depending on search subject, usually only about 10 - 30 or so people a day per page even on well visited sites. Why? Because most pages on average on a particular site do not rank highly on search results. But occasionally you will find a site with dozens or hundreds of pages with good search engine rankings. By pure chance or careful planning, these pages are optimized for search engines. Now say you had 100 pages each pulling in an average of 10 visitors a day from search engines. Your competitor also has 100 pages but they pull in an average of 70 (or even much more) visitors a day due to better optimization. Guess who will be writing success story.

Let us start with what we know about buyers:

1. Most sales are never made first time a prospect sees product or service. They are made on a subsequent encounter. Translation: it is a sure thing that unless you get that guy visiting your web site first time ever to return another day, he wont be buying anything from you. So you must make sure he returns.

2. The 80-20 rule. 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your customers. Which 20% are these? These are people who buy from you a second and a third time and so on. It is easier to make more sales out of your current customers than new ones. Which means that your web site has to have features that, again, keep your customers coming back.

The above two facts should encourage you to think very clearly about your web site. If you have one of those sites that just advertise your product and offer no other features that encourage returning visits, you need to do some major redesign and add some features that do so. Now let us look at how buyers get to decision that they will either return another day or buy your product or service on any particular visit. First, something grabs hold of their attention. If not, they go - there are other better things to do. If their attention is taken, they have a quick look to see if they are interested. If they are interested, they spend some time. During that time spent on whatever they found that was interesting, they may develop desire for product or service or information. If they have desire, they will take action to fulfil that desire. That action is either purchasing or returning or doing something else related to either of those two. This process of attracting attention, creating interest, building desire, and getting action should be biggest - yes, biggest - driving factor behind your web site design and content.

There is a lot of ways to achieve this depending on your industry. A real estate site will not employ same methods as a parenting community. You will need to sit down and look at how you can do it best. You should visit some leading sites in and out of your industry and copy what they do (there is no point in inventing mediocrity when you can copy genius). You may also want to get a suitable consultant on this. For now, let us look at four steps in general.