Editing Web traffic (section)

{{short description|Flow of data across the Web, the largest portion of Internet traffic}}
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{{More footnotes|date=April 2012}}

'''Web traffic''' is the data sent and received by visitors to a [[website]]. Since the mid-1990s, web traffic has been the largest portion of [[Internet traffic]].<ref>{{cite web|last=Jeffay|first=Kevin|title=Tracking the Evolution of Web Traffic: 1995-2003*|url=http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jeffay/papers/MASCOTS-03a.pdf|work=UNC DiRT Group's Publications|publisher=University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill|access-date=2012-02-20|archive-date=2012-05-13|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120513161722/http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jeffay/papers/MASCOTS-03a.pdf|url-status=live}}</ref> Sites monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic to see which parts or pages of their site are popular and if there are any apparent trends, such as one specific page being viewed mostly by people in a particular country. There are many ways to monitor this traffic, and the gathered data is used to help structure sites, highlight security problems or indicate a potential lack of [[Bandwidth (computing)|bandwidth]]. 

Not all web traffic is welcomed.
Some companies offer [[advertising]] schemes that, in return for increased web traffic (visitors), pay for screen space on the site.

Sites also often aim to increase their web traffic through inclusion on [[search engine]]s and through [[search engine optimization]].