Referral vs Search Engine Traffic, Which is Better?

I have been asked many times in the past from website owners about the different types of traffic their website's receive. Most want to know, when attempting to drive traffic to their website, which method of traffic is more valuable, referral or search engine traffic and what method should they spend their time on building.

Most website owners I talk to assume that all traffic is equal, most can tell you the number of hits per day they are receiving, but few know the percentages of the different types of traffic methods, the conversion rate of their vistors and how the visitors are getting to their site's in the first place.

Here are the 3 types of traffic most stats packages display.
1. Bookmark or Direct Traffic
2. Referral
3. Search Engine

Bookmark:
When a user adds your website to their favorites and then clicks to your site from their bookmarks. Having a large % of bookmarks is good for the website owner. It usually means that visitors find the website's content valuable and want to save the website address to go back in the future.

Direct traffic:
When a visitor types in the the URL of a website in their browser's address bar and then goes to the site. Another area where you would want a high % of visitors from. This means that a visitor already knows your website and wants to go there. Google has a very high % of direct traffic, do to the fact that most people just type google.com to do their searches

Referral traffic:
Is considered to be any type of link that a user would click from one site to get to another that was not from a search engine. Referral traffic usually comes from link exchanges or one way links, you want a good % of traffic to come from referrals because of the steady flow of traffic you will receive.

Search Engine traffic:
Generally when a user puts in a set of keywords into a search engine type site like Google, Yahoo or MSN and a list of possible site's are displayed. Search Engine traffic is the most volitale and usually where most website owners spend their time in building.

Google Canonicalization?

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?

A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what Google calls it. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages.

For example, most people would consider these the same urls:
www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

For More info on the post:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

Google Data Centers

Find out where you site will rank in Google

Google Rankings and Updates
Want to see where your site ranks and were it will be ranked after the next Google update,just replace keyword with the phase you want to see if your site is ranked in Google, then replace the ip address to search another data center.

http://216.239.37.105/search?q=keyword

Google datacenters
216.239.37.104
216.239.37.105
216.239.37.106
216.239.37.107
216.239.37.147
216.239.37.99 - cw
216.239.39.104
216.239.39.106
216.239.39.107
216.239.39.99 - ex
216.239.53.104
216.239.53.106
216.239.53.107
216.239.53.99 - gv
216.239.57.104
216.239.57.105
216.239.57.106
216.239.57.107
216.239.57.147
216.239.57.98
216.239.57.99 - in
216.239.59.104
216.239.59.105
216.239.59.106
216.239.59.107
216.239.59.147
216.239.59.99 - kr
216.239.63.104
216.239.63.99
64.233.161.104
64.233.161.105
64.233.161.107
64.233.161.147
64.233.161.99
64.233.167.104
64.233.167.147
64.233.167.99
64.233.171.104
64.233.171.105
64.233.171.107
64.233.171.147
64.233.171.99
64.233.179.104
64.233.179.99
64.233.183.104
64.233.183.99
64.233.185.104
64.233.185.99
64.233.187.104
64.233.187.99
64.233.189.104
66.102.11.104
66.102.11.106
66.102.11.107
66.102.11.99 - kr
66.102.7.104
66.102.7.105
66.102.7.106
66.102.7.107
66.102.7.147
66.102.7.99 - mc
66.102.9.104
66.102.9.107
66.102.9.99 - lm
66.249.93.104
66.249.93.99
72.14.203.104 - dc
72.14.203.107 - ex
72.14.203.147
72.14.203.99 - ab
72.14.205.104
72.14.205.147
72.14.205.99
72.14.207.104 - gv
72.14.207.107 - va
72.14.207.147
72.14.207.99 - fi
72.14.209.104
72.14.209.147
72.14.209.99
72.14.211.104
72.14.211.147
72.14.211.99
72.14.215.104
72.14.215.147
72.14.215.99
72.14.217.104
72.14.217.147
72.14.217.99
72.14.219.104
72.14.219.147
72.14.219.99
72.14.221.104
72.14.221.147
72.14.221.99
72.14.223.104
72.14.223.147
72.14.223.99
72.14.235.104
72.14.235.147
72.14.235.99
72.14.253.104
72.14.253.147
72.14.253.99

Summary of the Ranking Method

Systems and methods consistent with the principles of the invention may score documents based, at least in part, on history data associated with the documents. This scoring may be used to improve search results generated in connection with a
search query.

Click Here to view the patent Google submitted to rank search results pages.

I thought it would be helpful to see what the criteria was that Google used to rank pages and how complex it is to decifer why some pages rank ahead of others.

Click here to view SEOmos Summary of the patent.

The Journey Begins

what I have found to be true over the past ten years in the web promotion field is that there are no easy ways or magical secrets to attracting visitors to your website, good original content and strong use of meta data, an aggressive and strategic linking campaign and a good website scheme will produce results over time.

Its also just as important to know the Don'ts as well as the Do's. Doing the wrong things can destroy all your efforts in doing the right things. It is my hope that this blog will give you the information you need to be successful. We will examine the best practices and the pitfalls of SEO. We will discover new tools to use for both analyzing our progress and pushing us forward. We will find how to work efficiently. So if your willing to do the work (and I mean work), then together we will journey on the road to success.

Link Exchange SEO Help

Why a blog
It has been my experience that the best way to get advice is to
give out advice first. By offering your opinion on a topic the
person on the receiving end will almost certainly respond with
any corrections and additional information they are able think
of. This is how I have learned so many tips, by reviewing sites
without solicitation and waiting for a response. Most of the
time I have been able to help by passing on new and valuable
information, but sometimes I get a response loaded with tips
and techniques that I had never thought of.

Now its time to share. I know that maintaining this blog will
be lots of work, but I am not so naive to think that I will not
reap great benefits. As I share the things I know, I will
receive back the wisdom of the collective intelligence of the
readers. As with anything in life, I will get out of this what
I put in to this.

So let's start with an email that I frequently send to sites I
visit. It contains basic ideas that can help with SEO. Yes, it
only scratches the surface, but I will build on this
foundation.

The experts say that search engines use "Backlinks" to
determine how high your page rank should be. Backlinks are
links on others websites that link back to yours. You want to
have lots of quality backlinks. The best way to get backlinks
is by listing your site in as many web directories as possible.
The big directories are DMOZ are Yahoo. So if your able and if
you can afford it, get listed in these (DMOZ is free but
diffucult to get accepted).

Even better, I found,
http://www.searchenginecolossus.com/ for list of other web directories. Again, creating these backlinks will do the trick.


Another idea is to become a member of a webmaster forum like
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/ or
http://www.webmasterworld.com/. You will find great resources to help in your endeavors. Learn what other website owners are doing to drive traffic to their site.


subscribe to the Web Position Gold newsletter.
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You can sign-up here:
www.web-positiongold.com/newsletter-web-position-gold.htm


Link Exchanges
One of the best ways to increase your website Google rankings is to build the number of incoming links to your website. I am alway looking to add quality website's to my exchange below.