Yahoo! was the most popular web property in April 2011, according to comScores’s report of the top 50 U.S. online properties. Yahoo! sites attracted 187.4 million visitors in April, followed by Microsoft sites with 178.9 million and Google sites with 175.9 million.

Fast growing sites included Netflix.com, which ranked #36 overall with 28.6 million visitors and CareerBuilder LLC debuting on the list at #43 with 24.9 million visitors.

An often cited way of generating traffic is to leave comments on blogs and forums along with a link to your website. Write a relevant and well written comment and this could bring visitors to your site.

Even better, if the link is ‘do follow’ the major search engines such as Google and Bing may recognize the link as a ‘vote of confidence’ in your site, thereby helping your site rank higher in the search engines.

Social media generates less than 1 percent of traffic for the average website, according to research by ForeSee Results.

According to ForeSee’s research, social media websites are not directly responsible for much website traffic, but still play an influential role.

If you love the idea of a free, open source alternative to Google Analytics, check out Piwik.

Piwik is a nice looking web analytics platform that offers many of the same features as Google Analytics, plus some impressive extras.

YouTube may get the most video viewers, but Hulu serves the most video ad impressions, displaying nearly 1.1 billion ad impressions in January 2011.

Indeed, Hulu accounts for more than double the volume of ad impressions as its second place rival, Tremor Media Video Network, which had 503.7 million ad views in January.

With its diverse online publishing properties – ranging from TechCrunch to the newly acquired Huffington Post – AOL wants to attract ever more readers to its network using a system that optimizes content for both readers and the search engines.

Well, readers are the ultimate target, but since AOL expects the search engines to drive 40 percent of its traffic, the company regards search engine optimization (SEO) as essential for generating a large number of those readers.

According to its publishing business plan, the AOL Way, AOL wants more direct traffic and less traffic from the search engines.

No surprises there. What online publisher – i.e. one that makes money by monetizing web traffic via advertising – doesn’t want to be less dependent on sources of traffic that Google, Bing, etc can switch off at any moment?

A report from ForeSee Results shows that search engines and promotional emails are more effective in driving visitors to online retail websites than is social media.

While search engine results drive 13 percent of visitors and promotional emails drive 10 percent, social media is responsible for just 3 percent of visitors to online retail websites.

When it comes to creating popular Facebook fan pages, Internet marketers can learn a thing or two from major brands such as Starbucks, Coca-Cola and Oreo.

As reported by marketing research firm eMarketer, major brands such as Coca-Cola (which had 19.8 million fans in November 2010), Starbucks (which had 18.5 million fans) and Oreo (which had 15.2 million), use such tactics as the following to attract and keep their huge Facebook fan bases:

Yahoo! led comScore’s list of the most popular 50 web properties in December 2010. Leading the top 50, Yahoo sites had an estimated 181.2 million visitors during the month.

Google sites were the second most popular web property in December 2010, with 179.3 million visitors, and Microsoft sites were third most popular with 177.0 million.