Feedback form and guestbook do not give enough qualitative information to these questions.

Statistics give us information on quantity of visits more than on quality. Although we can estimate average length of visit, number of page views or most popular paths, we still don't know for sure what people think of site.

The best way to get an answer is to ask site's users in a direct, simple and convivial way. The online survey give us a precise estimation of site users opinion that no other tools can match.

However a few requirements must be met in order to get valid information:

The choice of questions is essential. List your priorities first. What do you want to get from survey ? Focus on your priorities. Do not ask questions that won't help to fulfill goals set.

The questions must relate to a significant part of audience. If site is about cars do not ask question about trucks unless you want to create a new “truck” section.

The questions need to be as precise as possible in order to get relevant answers and useful information.

Too many open questions will not allow to see significant trends of audience because answers will be too diverse. An open question is where users are free to give answer they want.

Too many closed questions will not allow you to know very precisely what people think of your site. A close question is where you give a choice of answers to.

A good qualitative survey is a balance between open and closed questions to meet your goals.

It is necessary to limit survey to one response per IP address. This way survey is clean and is not perverted by many answers from a same unique user. A good online survey software should have functionality to identify an IP address and to block it after a survey is filled.

Online software help you to build, manage and analyze a web survey.

Some run on same server as analyzed site's. Others work on a third party's server.

Some are free, some are limited by a number of surveys or questions, or answers.

In order to get best information as possible in most tailored way, best option is to install a software on your server and to customize survey to your own need.

I recommend CsPoller, a cgi-script, cheap, customizable, easy to use.

Other choices are SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang as third-party online survey software.

A good qualitative survey should have:

I - Introduction II - Web Directories III - Search Engines - Rankings III - Link ahoy! IV - Messageboards and Forums V - Conclusion

I - Introduction --------------------------------

The one thing that webmasters wish for is a steady flow of web traffic to their website.

My aim with this article is to give you a few ideas for bringing web traffic to your website. Once your web traffic is up and flowing, what you do with web traffic is up to you.

First and foremost, web traffic mainly comes from following areas; in no particular order 1. Web Directories 2. Search Engines 3. Link ahoy! 4. Discussion Boards/Forums

We go into each of these in detail below.

II - Web directories --------------------------------

A web directory is not my favorite medium for building web traffic; but it can be useful to build PR which can help to achieve better rankings in Google Search Engine. PR (range of 1-10) is one of factors Google uses to rank its results when someone does a search. Basically, with a higher PR; it is believed that your listing should rank better than those with other PR.

With a quick overview about PR; PR is determined by how many backlinks you have, and quality of those backlinks. The more backlinks you have from quality websites you have, higher PR you will generate; and as a result; better rankings.

Thats beauty about some web directories and link pages. According to how high PR values are for webpage where you want to place your link; your webpage PR value would increase. If you could manage to get many links on various PR6 websites for example; your PR value should increase and your rankings should get better and should drive more traffic.

How to find web directories you ask? Its a simple task: All you need to do is to go to www.google.com and type in your keyword and word directory For example, if keyword was 'Cat', search term would be ‘Cat directory’ are various Cat directories should come up.

III - Linkahoy! --------------------------------

Ebaumsworld is a very popular website for finding jokes. It currently enjoys over 750, 000 unique visitors a month. Yet, on typing ‘jokes’ and performing a search, ebaumsworld is not present in top 100 results. How then can Ebaumsworld enjoy so much web traffic a month?

Ebausmsworld mainly achieves this through backlinks. Interestingly enough, on doing a backlink count with Google, Ebaumsworld chalked up 9,550 in backlinks.

Now lets face reality: Manually creating 9,550 backlinks by manually going to web pages and submitting your link is a very tiring task.

The only way to create so many genuine backlinks is by having GOOD CONTENT.

After studying major websites, I've found that they are two great ways of creating this:

1 Media/Downloads 2. Articles

With Ebaumworld.com, their key is loads of media, not necessarily article writing. Web surfers are attracted to downloads and media in general; It’s a much welcomed difference to all of text found on web pages.