Three Types Of Traffic

Traffic can be categorized in three ways: Search Engines, Direct Traffic and Referring Sites.  It isn't really too difficult to understand the difference between each kind of traffic, but keep in mind they tend to overlap so even when you are using some sort of analytical program on your website or blog you cannot look at the different types of traffic as having come from the source it is listed under without digging into the analytical data a little deeper and for our purpose here it isn't that important anyway.

Search engine traffic obviously comes from the search engines.  You'll hear a lot of talk about being on page one of Google as being some sort of marker for finding success.  I don't want to say that isn't important, but it isn't as important as people would have you believe because Google only represents 6% of the search engine traffic with 5% of that coming from You Tube which Google owns.

Being listed on page one of Google for certain keywords isn't going to bring you server crushing traffic.  You can look at Google Adsense and see how much people are paying per click for certain keywords and it will give you an indication of how competitive that keyword is and avoid wasting your time and money chasing them.

Here is why you want to avoid chasing them, there are 1.5 billion people on the planet using the internet and while you can sit back with your calculator figuring out how much money you're going to make if 1% of all those people buy your product or service that isn't how it works, not at all.

Pay attention here, this is important.  Johnny, wake up!  Online traffic is not much different than the traffic we have on our Expressways, Interstates and Autobahns all over the planet.  If I look out my window I can see the sleepy little street (called a strasse here in Germany) and there isn't very much traffic on it, 

If I look down into the valley I can see an Autobahn which has heavy traffic on it.  The people on the autobahn drive by my house without even realizing they passed my house which is what search engine traffic is like.  Millions of people drive by your website and blog everyday and they don't even realize it because they don't know to look for it.

If I were allowed to post a sign on the Autobahn with a keyword on it than thousands of people would see it as they pass by, right?  That doesn't mean they are going to exit the autobahn and come to my house though.  Lets go back and discuss the other two types of traffic and then we'll come back to keywords.

The people that come to my house come to my house because they were invited which is what direct traffic is like.  They have my address just like people have the URL to your website or blog.  The day you created your website or blog this was the only way you could get traffic to visit because it wasn't listed on the search engines yet.  How effective would it be to hand out your address day after day?  It would take a lot of effort on your part, wouldn't it?  So it would be safe to say that direct traffic has a purpose, but it is a temporary solution for getting traffic to your site.

The other type of traffic was referral traffic and that comes from referring sites like a traffic exchange, text ad exchange, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites and other non-direct sources.  If someone asked the clerk at the store where I lived and she gave them directions to my house that would be similar to referral traffic.  Referral traffic would also include the same clerk telling someone who was looking for an apple tree that there were apple trees in my yard and giving them directions to my house.  Make sense?

Alright, back to search engines and keywords.  If you were to do a search for apple trees there is no telling what you would get for results.  It certainly wouldn't be very likely that my apple trees would be  listed as one of the top search results, would it?  And yet that is what people do all the time with their keywords.  They compete with millions of other sites with the hope that someone will find their website or blog and it just isn't going to happen like that.

So how do we get people to our websites and blogs using search engines?  We pick keywords that mean something to the people we want to visit our sites.  In fact, if we had done our research BEFORE we threw up a website or blog we would know that apple trees was a poor choice and we would have chosen something more specific.

At the bottom of the hill I live on there is a small business that processes apples into apple juice or apple wine so lets use that business as an example of choosing our keywords correctly.  If we were to post a sign on the Autobahn with a more specific keyword like 'apple processing' we would improve our chances of getting people to exit the autobahn to visit our business and we would want to look at using 'apple juice' and 'apple wine' as possible keywords as well.  Can you see the difference?

This all takes time and if you are chasing keywords that have too much competition and keywords that no one is looking for anyway it isn't going to get you any traffic.  So you have the first position on page one of Google for 'left rear wheel,' so what?  Is anyone looking for that?  If they are, than you have found yourself a nice niche market, but if not then it isn't going to make any difference whether you use that keyword phrase or one with three-hundred million people looking for 'wheels.'

I hope this brings some value to your marketing efforts.  I'm going to start covering some ways you can get referral traffic to your websites and blogs, but keep in mind these are resources you will want to use while you are waiting for your sites to be indexed on the search engines and to build your opt-in lists.  They are not permanent sources of traffic even though you will always want to use them to kick start your traffic for your new sites.