Getting Calls from Google, Yahoo, etc

I just re-did a site for my company.

Beforehand, they were getting about 1 hit a month (literally) and now since I've redesigned it - 3 weeks ago - and implemented some SEO techniques, the hits have been steadily increasing up to about 150/day now.

Yesterday, my boss got 3 phone calls - one from google, one from yahoo, and one from Thanx Media/Endeca asking if we wanted to use their website promotion services.

Why do you think this is. Is it because they've seen the increased hit count, or did I do something stupid and sign up for some service that put us on a mailing list or something? I've applied to numerous directories, signed up for google analytics and webmaster tools, and... well, maybe that's it.

Any idea why we would get these calls?

Thanks for any input.

That company wouldn't have access to your site statistics unless you've made them public, so they wouldn't be aware of your increasing visitor numbers. Most likely they just found your site through a Google search -- somewhat ironic really.

Agreed - there's probably no way for them to see my site's statistics - but 3 calls in one day seems more than ironic... I don't really buy that it's just coincidence. But who knows, maybe it is. And to add to this more, they called a day after the site hits (or visits - what's the preferred term?) jumped from 82 to 151.

Visits would be the correct term. Hits are any request to the server for an object, including pages, css/javascript files, images, etc.

I really would just put it down to coincidence. Perhaps check your site logs for unusual search terms just prior to their phone call. One of the reasons I love using hittail is that you can often see in real time what terms people found you for just prior to the link request / advertising request / seo help request / etc coming through.

Okay... I can deal with 'coincidence'

Thanks JagNet.

and I'll check out hittail, that sounds like a useful tool.

It is very useful indeed - I wouldn't be without it (though it can be a little addictive watching the search hits come in, so be warned )

that's a good thing - it'll give me something to do at work

do you pay for hittail plus, or just have the free version (hittail basic)?

The free version works fine for me

okay - looking at the features of each - the free one seems to be perfectly fine, that's why I asked.

thansk so much for your help.

Absolutely not. 150,000 per hour, maybe.

Mailing lists--your idea--is probably correct.

By the way, the earlier suggestion about making your stats public is incorrect. There are big sites that monitor web traffic. Don't ask me how, b/c it seems like an invasion of privacy, but they get it. Compete.com included. I use it before buying parked domain names to check natural traffic. You can also use it to see which sites might be worthy of link consideration.

TT

yeah - 150 visits/day is pretty insignificant...

and compete.com is awesome - thanks for making me aware of that.

Thanks again for your help JagNet and ThinkTank.