Increasing website traffic is a common goal of most website owners, but to do so, you have to know how visitors get to your site.
There are four main sources for website visitors: organic search, paid search, direct, and referral.
Organic search and paid search is simply traffic that comes from search engines like Google. I’ve discussed them previously in my off-site SEO and digital advertising posts.
Referral traffic sources are links on other sites back to your site.
These can be harder to obtain, but here are some common methods:
- Include social sharing buttons on your site
- Guest posts on other websites with a link back to your site
- Website fields on social site profiles like Twitter
- Forum posts
- Comments on blogs and other website
Direct traffic is from visitors that find your site directly as follows:
- Directly typing your website into the browser
- Clicking on a link in an email
- Using a site in the browsers bookmark
- Clicking a link embedded in a document, PDF, excel, or other file
To get more direct traffic try these actions:
- Put your website address on your stationery, business cards, etc.
- Include links to your site in the body and signature of your email
- Link to your site in email newsletters
- Add buttons to your site so visitors can easily bookmark your content for return views to your site
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This article first appeared on Blue Zoo Creative’s website.