Sources of Traffic - Setting Priorities

To begin with, there are basically three sources of traffic to most websites, which are Direct Traffic, Referred Traffic and Search Engine Traffic. Whenever I am asked the question “How can I build consistent reliable traffic?”, What I’ll discuss in detail is something I usually briefly tell my readers. Before knowing how to build traffic which is targeted and good for your website, you need to know where to start and set your priorities. First, you’ll have to be familiar with each type of traffic:

Direct Traffic

This is the traffic which you’ll get from people who either remember your website’s URL, visit it regularly or have bookmarked it. This is the most reliable source of traffic and builds up constantly with the blog’s reach. An ideal percentage of your total traffic should be somewhere near 30-35%.

Search Engines

Unlike direct traffic, as the name suggests, most traffic will be from search engines, namely: Google, Yahoo, Windows Live Search. Search engine users who arrive on your website will not normally be interested in your site but rather a small part of your content which matches their search. Bounce rates are always more than 80% and you have very less chances of expecting them to return, so the ideal share of search engine traffic should be somewhere near 25-35%.

Referring Sites

Most websites tend to receive traffic from this source which is very general as it can be further classified as follows:

• Social Media
• Social Networks
• Other Networks
• Websites
• Blogs

Although this list continues but I’ve listed the most common ones. Referring sites usually give traffic which does not last very long. Normally good traffic ranges from 2-3 days especially on Social Media and Social Networks. Some networks bring recurring traffic which is dependent on some other factor such as your contribution or activity while others might bring a few traffic spikes to your overall graph. This should normally range from 25-30%.
The advantage to bring diversified traffic to your blog is that your blog’s traffic never falls weak whether there are no people interested in your site directly or others stop using keywords related to your blog. You wouldn’t want to rely 90% on Social Media which brings you about 300 Visitors a day, as time goes by, the traffic fades out and you’re left with less than 50 visitors a day, which is pathetic. So always set your traffic priorities accordingly to obtain good results from your traffic in the long run.