On sources of traffic

From: C. Antonio Romero <romero_at_alumni.princeton.edu>
Date: Thu 29 Mar 2001 10:02:52 -0600

MICHAEL MARTINEZ <Michael_at_xenite.org> WROTE:

----
My domain still gets the majority of its traffic from
other Web sites. More than 3,000 sites link to us...
I still believe that is the
best long-term online promotional strategy for any Web
site.
----

Michael (and others),

I suspect that you're right about this... but here's
a question for you: What percentage of your traffic
comes from such links, really? and what percentage
from search engines?

The arts site I work for (www.culturekiosque.com)
gets the lion's share of traffic from search engines,
actually-- even with a couple thousand inbound links,
accumulated over five plus years publishing on the
Web, we don't do that well in terms of traffic we get via
those links. Many of those links are on sites which
don't see huge amounts of traffic-- academic sites
that decided to link to us for one reason or another,
for instance. And I suspect we have a lot of visitors
who just come in once, see what they were looking
for (typically a news story or interview in our archives),
and get out again.

We're planning some measures that
should increase the number of inbound links and
reciprocal links (a link directory of our own-- and
no, folks, we're not using Zeus, we're rolling our
own) and hoping that this will improve our search
engine rankings yet further, but we haven't been
all that focused on how much traffic extensive
reciprocal links might yield.

As a general rule, what percentage of one's traffic
should come from inbound links vs. engines vs.
no-referer (people coming in from bookmarks, I
suppose, or from directly entering the URL)?

-Antonio Romero
Webmaster, Culturekiosque.com
http://www.culturekiosque.com/
The European Guide to Arts, Entertainment and
Culture Worldwide





Received on Thu Mar 29 2001 - 10:02:52 CST