Let’s examine the four types of Web traffic: Direct traffic, Referring sites, search engines, and other.
Direct traffic doesn’t just refer to traffic from people who bookmarked your site or know the URL by memory. Direct traffic also refers to people who came to your site because of a television or print ad or through e-mail campaigns or other untraditional Web sources. Recently, GA has categorized some traffic coming through Google Adwords as direct traffic. That could be because of improperly tagged or untagged destination URLs in people’s ads (Read more here and here).
Referring site refers to sites linking to your site, which can be those sites you’ve developed link partnerships with, social bookmarking sites, microblogging sites, or other social networking sites. Google does not recommend trading links with other webmasters as the best method of obtaining links to your site. We don’t recommend it either as it is time consuming and often shows very little ROI. It is against Google’s TOS to buy or sell links that pass pagerank. Google recommends creating useful content as the best way to get people to link to your site and get referral traffic.
Search engine traffic is any traffic that comes from any search engines. This is where it’s important to make sure your website contains good Web content. Make sure to follow the rules, so you don’t find yourself in the sandbox or banned. According to one Google contributor, there is no more sandbox, but just play by the rules and you won’t get TOSed. And “other traffic” refers to any traffic that cannot be categorized in one of the first three categories, such as users who come from banner ads or e-mail newsletters.
So, what are the X and Y factors of SEO content? Think of a pie chart, which your analytics program probably uses to show the distribution of the traffic. The X factor refers to those times when you have had an equal amount of traffic from all four of those types of sources. This is highly likely, and not always the most desirable, so there’s also the Y factor. This refers to those times when a site receives an equitable amount of direct traffic, referring sites, and search engines. How do you achieve the X and Y factors? Peruse your analytics account, review what is and is not working, make changes where appropriate to drive traffic from all sources, and don’t rely too much or too little on traffic coming from one type of source. This means writing good Web content for website and using social media to promote that content and your site.
Here’re some other important blogs and articles to read:
Important Exception to Google Last Click Attribution
Excellent Analytics tip #18 (By Avinash Kaushik)
3 Creative ways to Drive More Traffic to Old Blog Posts
An Introduction to Link-Building: A Crucial Aspect of SEO
Stay social my friends,
Erick
