5 Types Of Traffic Sources For Websites

For bloggers and website owners, it is important to understand the different types of traffic sources you could use to gain traffic to your website or blog. Without knowing the traffic sources out there for use, how are you meant to take advantage of them? For this reason, here is a list of the main traffic sources bloggers and website owners use to guide traffic to their website or blog with a description for each one too.

• Organic (SEO) – The most used form of traffic to date, organic traffic is achieved by enabling your website to be seen by search engines. At its most basic form, people search on search engines and web pages relating the most to that search phrase will appear on the search results. It is free and a consistent way to gain lots of high quality traffic in the long run.
• Social Media – As I have already said in a previous article, all websites should have a Twitter account (and even a Facebook account) associated with them. This is because Twitter and social media has the potential to enable your website or blog to become viral and when something becomes viral, the possibilities are endless. At the end of the day, if your website/blog is good enough, it will be naturally shared by people which will always bring in extra traffic.
• Direct – This is the term given to traffic that enters onto your website directly. For this to happen, the web user must either have bookmarked your website or manually have typed in the address of your website into their web browser. It is good to have direct traffic as it shows your website is useful to people who have already viewed it. As well as this, it suggests people do not just come to your website and leave because they do not like it.
• Referral – As it says in the name, referral traffic is traffic which ‘forwards’ you on, in essence. Websites will link to each other and when one website links to another and that link is clicked, it counts as a referral traffic. Again, this type of traffic is good to get but hard to get – you will have to have a good website/blog to impress other websites enough for them to link to yours.
• Email Marketing – Some website and blogs will offer subscriptions for web users to get updates via email. If you have a large audience to email to, this is a great way to continue getting traffic. However, it will require a lot of upkeep work making the emails. Also, email marketing is strongly associated with spam (which will never work in your favour).

If you were to take something away from this article, it would be to rank organic traffic as the most important. This is because it is free, provides the most new and high quality traffic and also can provide consistent amounts of traffic for months or even years! Therefore, learn to optimise your articles with SEO, get organic traffic and then look to implement a few of the other forms of traffic after that.