To answer this question we take the service from Alexa, an Amazon company, which got founded 1996. This is the true pioneer in the world of web analytics and got the necessary experience over the years. How their data are collected and have to get interpreted is declared under the menu About Us on the Alexa website:
Alexa's traffic estimates are based on data from our global traffic panel, which is a sample of millions of Internet users using one of over 25,000 different browser extensions. In addition, we gather much of our traffic data from direct sources in the form of sites that have chosen to install the Alexa script on their site and certify their metrics. However, site owners can always choose to keep their certified metrics private.
Our global traffic rank is a measure of how a website is doing relative to all other sites on the web over the past 3 months. The rank is calculated using a proprietary methodology that combines a site's estimated average of daily unique visitors and its estimated number of pageviews over the past 3 months. We provide a similar country-specific ranking, which is a measurement of how a website ranks in a particular country relative to other sites over the past month.
Let us take a look at some actual ranking examples from Alexa (the ranking of the best sites can get found here):
#1 google.com
#2 facebook.com
#3 youtube,com
#15 linkedin.com
#26 bing.com
#109 nytimes.com
#173 forbes.com
#258 google.at
#327 google.com.ph
#1163 heise.de (a IT magazine publisher from Germany)
#1449 orf.at (the Austrian TV station)
#3894 golem.de (IT and gaming online news from Germany)
#5528 krone.at (an Austrian daily newspaper)
#10563 kurier.at (an Austrian daily newspaper)
If you take a look at all this sites, then you see that all this sites have a lot of content. The content is bringing the visitors and the site metrics are getting considered in the search results of the search engines. It does not help you if you make a site, optimize it for a few keywords and think that you get now a lot of traffic. If you have no content on your site, which is interesting for your readers, then they are faster away then they have been coming.
SEO helps you only in starting a website. If you are not bringing new information and make your readers interested, then your website will not perform. In such a case you can create back-links optimize for keywords and result will be that nobody will visit or revisit your site.That gives you a bad ranking and you can start from the beginning again, because you'll lose your ranking in the search engines.
We can see an example about such a result from a Skype communication, which I had today in the morning:
He: We have spent around $7000 for Data itself to run the processes but we went in total loss. So now we are mostly looking for process where the clients give the specific data
Me: The data, which you can buy, are already heavy used by other centers. Responsible for this is the data protection law in the traditional outsourcing countries
He: Yes, we use to get lot of duplicate leads looks like the vendor sale the same data to multiple centers. Just know somebody suggested us to generate our own data with by developing websites and taking SEO Help.
Me: You'll not get enough data from a website to run a call center. There are so many websites, which are never getting visited by someone. Promotion at the good websites will be very expensive. It will be only profitable if the payout very high, but there is another rule: "As higher the offered payout is as less sales will be done."
You can take a look at the ranking of my blog at Alexa and compare it with the unique visitors, which are visiting my blog:
Yesterday I have started a free service from geovisites.com, which is listing the unique visitors per country. The geovisites are running since yesterday morning. On the right site of geovistes is listed the full day.:
Do you thing that one from the 38 US visitors will drop his phone number? If you are lucky then 1 from 1000 will do it. You'll see at Alexa that 18 millions of domains, which are having fewer visitors.
He: yes.. now I understood the equation, it's difficult to achieve. We are currently running a Online Campaign for Drug and alcohol rehab which went online a month ago, and the SEO work was done by a professional still it didn't gave us any inbound call: www.dictionbreakfree.com
Me: Alexa says about dictionbreakfree.com: We don't have enough data to rank this website. You see, the seo work alone brings nothing.
That it is not necessary to register your site at Alexa is showing the example from one of my customer. He made only a website for having one. His customers are property management companies, with he has contracts. For this he made never a SEO or registered his site somewhere. The site weber-haustechnik.at exists already around 20 years. Even this site has a better traffic ranking then the above one with SEO:
He: Oh God, i was having high expectations
Me: Seo is only search engine optimization. That alone does not bring visitors.
He: Sir i have found that when i look for process in Google search your blog is listed mostly on first page or second page ... so i think the quality of the articles also plays an important role in driving the traffic.
Me: Sure, the content makes the search engine optimization. Google is using similar data or the data from Alexa too.
He: I was not aware of that. We try to outsource SEO work to freelancers who were taking fewer fees. May be next time we should try with an expert who is good in SEO and content writing
Resume: Forget everything about SEO and tricking the search engines. If you like to get visitors coming to your site, then you have to write quality content about the topic of your website. Everything else is not more than a cat, which is hunting her own tail!.
If you are not permanently adding content to your website, then your website will be soon only a hidden secret in the World Wide Web. If you think you need to add only a few pictures and that is it, then you are wrong. Nobody is searching for pictures and pictures are not getting indexed by the search engines.
Tricking the search engines with optimizing the content for them, bring you only for a short time in front of the result list for the used keywords, but there is no guarantee that it brings you some visitors. As soon as they are changing their indexing algorithm you can get found as the last entry of a search result. Only quality content keeps you permanently in front and brings visitors to your site.
A website is like a store window - if the content does not change it will not attract customers.