White papers can increase Web site traffic because of the number of people who click on inbound links and by an increased search engine ranking value for the web site. However, the value of inbound traffic can be strongly influenced by the types of people who click on links (visitor qualification).

Inbound Links - Inbound links are hyperlinks (web links) that point from one web page to another. The link text or clickable image and its location, such as within the initial screen area – above the fold, can strongly influence the number of people who click on the links.

Qualified Visitors - Qualified visitors are people who visit web sites who meet a certain criteria (such as age and interest category), indicating their likeliness and capability to perform desired actions (such as order products or complete subscriptions). The types of web sites that contain the inbound links can determine the quality of the web site visitors provided.

This figure shows that web site traffic value can be measured using the number and quality of visitors. In the first example, a very popular automotive web site is referring 100 people per day to an online bookstore for Internet Marketing books. The second web site is an email association that refers 20 visitors per day. Because the web traffic from the auto site is not highly qualified, the conversion rate (sales percentage) is only 0.1% (3 book sales per month), while the web traffic from the email association is highly qualified with a 5% conversion rate (1 book sale per day).