Are you monitoring your traffic sources to your blog or website? If no, try to install Google Analytics. It is a great tool for webmasters to monitor their site traffic information with extensive details of sources for free from Google. As you can see from Google Analytics chart, there are three type of sources:
1. Direct
2. Referral
3. Search Engine
Direct traffic is referred directly from the user. Either they type your URL in the browser or open from their browser’s bookmark, it will count as direct traffic. If they have been referred from other websites or blogs or forums, it will be counted as referral traffic. For most new blogs, their main traffic will be from this channel. And it is depending on the link building activity of the webmaster / blogger. One of the highest referral traffic I gained is from DigitalPoint forum, Entrecard and Blogcatalog.
Search engine traffic (SET) can be difficult for any new websites or blogs. We need to concentrate on various SEO topics to get numbers of visitors from SET. Building good SEO (search engine optimization) is the key to increase SET. There are tons of ways to improve our blog / website SEO. Don’t always go for high traffic keywords as it will be very competitive. Try to concentrate on low traffic keywords at Google External Keyword tool.
The most important formula to keep healthy traffic is to keep balance of these three traffic sources.
In my opinion, the best balance traffic sheet is:
33% Direct
33% Referral
33% Search Engine (SE)
Reason:
At any point of time, if SE penalized us, or Entrecard / Digg / Stumbleupon banned us, the traffic sources from this channel will drop to almost ground zero level. If this happens, we will still have another two portions to support our blog / website.
What is your best balance traffic sheet and your best reason?
my major source of traffic is both google and direct and i can’t complain considering im getting others to my site
I totally agree.
Google Analytics has been my best traffic analizer tool. I also use Sitemeter but no other tool can beat Google´s.
Good rest of week and happy blogging!
Good to hear that you are using it too. I still prefer to use google analytics and quantcast as second choice.
I’m using google Analytic to and I clearly see how my blog traffic is slow.
At least you know what is really happening to your blog now. That is where we all learn how to improve our SEO, traffics, etc.
Diversification is the key to any sound strategy……just like with investments!
Agreed. Concentrating on specific channel can get us to doom anytime.
In my case, majority of my traffic came from the SEs (at about 80%) but I have several referral visits. I guess you have no problem w/ direct traffic because its easy for us to remember your domain name which is the key of direct traffic.
Your SEO work should be working well there. Not many have reach 80% SE traffic like yours. My main traffic channel is from direct.
I’ve been using Google Analytics for quite a while and it is great to find out your blogs traffic etc, I always found it a valuable site for website help!
Good to hear that. Analytics is a must tool for all bloggers.