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Outline four different methods of building web-site traffic. Describe the relevance of following tools for company hosting a website: RSS, FTP, Blogs, and HTML.

1. Introduction:

   The use of offline and online promotion techniques of generating visitors to website or increasing audience of website (both new and existing customers) is referred to as traffic building campaign. Various methods for generating traffic are as follows:

   i. Search engine marketing.

   ii. Online PR

   iii. Online partnerships

   iv. Interactive advertising.

   v. Email marketing.

   vi. Viral Marketing.

2. Methods for building website traffic:

   i. Search-engine marketing: Search engines and directories are the primary method of finding information about company and its products. Search engine optimization involves a structured approach used to increase the position of the company or its products in a search-engine natural or organic results listing. Although each search engine has its own evolving algorithm with hundreds of weighting factors there are common factors that influence search engine rankings such as:

• Frequency of occurrence in body copy
• Number of inbound links (page rank)
• Title HTML Tags
• Meta Tags

• Alternative graphic text.

  ii. Online Public Relations (PR): The management of reputation- the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics is called as Online PR. The main element of online PR is maximizing favourable mentions of organizations, its brands, products or web sites on third party web sites which are likely to be visited by its target audience. Activities which can be considered to be online PR include:

• Communicating with media online
• Link building
• Blogs, podcasting and RSS
• Managing how your brand is presented on third-party sites.

• Creating a buzz – online viral marketing.

  iii. Online Partnerships: Partnerships are important part of today’s marketing mix. The three key types of online partnerships which need to be managed are as follows:

• Link Building: It is a key activity for search engine optimization. It deals with getting brand visible on third party sites.
• Affiliate marketing: It has become very popular since many achievers over 20% of their online sales through affiliates (also known as ‘aggregators’ since they aggregate offers from different providers). The advertisers do not pay until the product has been purchased or a lead generated.

• Online sponsorship: The linking of brand with related content or context for the purpose of creating brand appeal in a form that is clearly distinguishable from a banner, button or other standardised ad unit.

  iv. Interactive advertising: Interactive advertising uses online or offline interactive media to communicate with consumers and to promote products, brands, services, and public service announcements, corporate or political groups. The goals of interactive advertising are usually akin to the traditional objectives of advertising, i.e. to sell a product. This in turn means that many of the traditional elements of advertising impact and effectiveness remain relevant, even within the scope of interactive media advertising impact and effectiveness remain relevant, even within the scope of interactive media. The objectives of interactive advertising are as follows:

• Delivering content
• Enabling transaction
• Shaping attitudes
• Soliciting response
• Encouraging retention

1. RSS

   i. RSS (Rich Site Summary); originally RDF Site Summary; often dubbed Really Simple Syndication, uses a family of standard web feed formats] to publish frequently updated information: blog entries, news headlines, audio, video. An RSS document includes full or summarized text, and metadata, like publishing date and author's name.

   ii. RSS feeds enable publishers to syndicate data automatically. A standard XML file format ensures compatibility with many different machines/programs. RSS feeds also benefit users who want to receive timely updates from favourite websites or to aggregate data from many sites.

   iii. Subscribing to a website RSS removes the need for the user to manually check the web site for new content. Instead, their browser constantly monitors the site and informs the user of any updates. The browser can also be commanded to automatically download the new data for the user.

   iv. Software termed "RSS reader", "aggregator", or "feed reader", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based, present RSS feed data to users. Users subscribe to feeds either by entering a feed's URI into the reader or by clicking on the browser's feed icon. The RSS reader checks the user's feeds regularly for new information and can automatically download it, if that function is enabled. The reader also provides a user interface.

2. FTP

   i. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet.

   ii. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and uses separate control and data connections between the client and the server.[1] FTP users may authenticate themselves using a clear-text sign-in protocol, normally in the form of a username and password, but can connect anonymously if the server is configured to allow it. For secure transmission that hides (encrypts) the username and password, and encrypts the content, FTP is often secured with SSL/TLS ("FTPS"). SSH File Transfer Protocol ("SFTP") is sometimes also used instead, but is technologically different.

   iii. The first FTP client applications were command-line applications developed before operating systems had graphical user interfaces, and are still shipped with most Windows, Unix, and Linux operating systems. Dozens of FTP clients and automation utilities have since been developed for desktops, servers, mobile devices, and hardware, and FTP has been incorporated into hundreds of productivity applications, such as Web page editors.

3. Blogs

   i. Blogs (web blogs in short) give an easy method of publishing web pages including those with news or event listings.

   ii. Blogs give an easy method of publishing web pages which can be best described as online journals, diaries, and news or event listings.

   iii. A blog is a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order (the most recent post appears first).

   iv. The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users.

   v. Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries; others function more as online brand advertising of a particular individual or company.

   vi. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic.

   vii. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important contribution to the popularity of many blogs.

   viii. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blogs), photographs (photo blogs), videos (video blogs or "vlogs"), music (MP3 blogs), and audio (podcasts).

   ix. Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts. In education, blogs can be used as instructional resources. These blogs are referred to as Edu blogs.

4. HTML

   i. HTML or HyperText Markup Language is the main markup language for creating web pages and other information that can be displayed in a web browser.

   ii. HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags enclosed in angle brackets (like <html>), within the web page content. HTML tags most commonly come in pairs like and , although some tags represent empty elements and so are unpaired, for example . The first tag in a pair is the start tag, and the second tag is the end tag (they are also called opening tags and closing tags). In between these tags web designers can add text, further tags, comments and other types of text-based content.

   iii. The purpose of a web browser is to read HTML documents and compose them into visible or audible web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page.

   iv. HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites. HTML allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. It can embed scripts written in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML web pages. Web browsers can also refer to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the look and layout of text and other material. The W3C, maintainer of both the HTML and the CSS standards, encourages the use of CSS over explicit presentational HTML.