It’s time for another ProBlogger Poll.
What is the Biggest Source of Traffic to Your Blog?
Is it search engines? If so which one? Is it RSS subscribers and loyal readers? Is it Social Media sites (and which one is it)? Do other blogs and sites send most? Or is it some other source of traffic?
If you want to base your answer on a period of time – do it for April (so far).
{democracy:35}
I’m looking forward to seeing the results of this one. Feel free to expand on your response further in the comments on this post.
actually most of my hits come specifically for my post about best NYC brunch spots!
Stumble, Direct, and then Google.
My biggest sources of traffic are Google, Direct,Squidoo, forums and several smaller sources.
Mostly on my blog traffic comes from:
1. Search Engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live) 75.5%
2. Other Sites and Blogs 15.5%
SU, Google, Entrecard.
Is there any information could be extracted from these data? To improve our sites?
Google, but to be more specific, Image Search.
Simple optimization of images – alt, title, height, width, etc – is a simple way of getting fairly relevant traffic.
Google, Yahoo, Entrecard, and then other
We utilize both a Blog approach (blogger.com) and our web site content based keyword association to our themes to draw visitors. Its a Turtles Approach but it builds hardened loyalty on return visits. Took about 9 months to get to this level but now with the PR4 ranking we are getting hits from all corners of the round globe!
Google is by far our greates friend in the search engine wars.
I have a lot of very loyal readers. This was discovered after I kind of disappeared for a month (6 posts in a whole month!) due to assorted issues. When I came back, I expected to have to start again from scratch, but all my readers were still there!
Google is by far my Number one referer. My objective now is to retain as much of this traffic as possible.
I would have to say the readers for the most part / direct visits … then search engines and then referring sites.
I want to be able to say that it’s hard to tell because I get a good spread of traffic from many sources but basically Stumble Upon and Google send 99%.
Depends on the day – I am a new site and if I get a link from a site, that draws more traffic – otherwise, it’s Google
Google sends me 80% of my traffic the rest is mainly stumbleupon and other social networking sites.
After my little “rant” appeared on the New York Times about Miley Cyrus’ photo fiasco, and several other news sites/media picked up the story with links to my blog, I’d have to say April has been mainly from other Websites. It’s been interesting to say the least.
Wow, I am surprised to see Google as #1 traffic source right now. However, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, as this is what I voted for as well!
Google, but to be specific I get a lot of traffic from Google Image.
Here are my Top 3
1. Google
2. Direct
3. Google Images
After this I have a few specific web sites that link to my site and followed by other search engines.
Google is my largest source of traffic, with the Images search coming in 2nd and StumbleUpon third. It is amazing to see how many image searches there are, although including a clothed image of a porn star in a post can do that I guess.
Probably the most consistent source of traffic for my blog has to be Google — most of my blog posts seem to index reasonably well — but I’ll get huge spikes from StumbleUpon from time to time. These stumbles can account for as much as 10x my regular daily visitor count.
1) google
2) dzone.com
3) direct
Google is 40% of my traffic. Almost 50% is social networks (i get a lot of traffic from dzone.com for my flash source code). Plaxo, Twitter and BlogCatelog make up most of the rest of the social networkings traffic.
Stumble, EntreCard and Direct traffic. My percentage of direct traffic is very high, which shows I have a lot of regular readers. I am happy about that, but need to find a way to attract new readers!
I got a huge spike from Stumble but if you remove that 45% of my hits are from other site referrals.
My goal is to have most of my people be repeat visitors but for now most come from google and forums.
SU
StumbleUpon sends the most traffic, in total, because it sends people for a long long time. Twitter gives good spikes, though.
I get practically nothing from Google. Time for research on SEO.
Being ranked high in google, some yahoo, but not much from them.
finding it interesting that Google so far outweighs the ‘other Search Engine’ category!
Google and other Search Engines – some of which I never know they existed
About 95% of my traffic is from google searches, then there is the occasional burst of digg traffic, recently been picking up a lot of Yahoo searches, and the rest is from unknown sources.
1. Google’s Search Engine
2. Google Images
:-)
This is good to see.. we have a few sites that get really.. REALLY different traffic flows.
Our main site consists mainly of repeat visitors… about 60%. The rest comes from google, yahoo, etc. 1% other… not even sure what “other” means.
The “niche” sites get most of their traffic via keywords from google.. organic searches and such.
It is really cool to see how many people get a lot of traffic from stumble.. very good to note!
my weird comments on other people’s sites…. also the goog.
For me, Google brings me the majority of traffic. I’ve only recently started getting some from StumbleUpon.
Google….Yahoo….Stumble…Blogcatalog
#1 Google (45%)
#2 Referrals (30%)
Perhaps not surprisingly, as a regular contributor to DPS, the biggest source of traffic to my blog (at 17% over the last 12 months, 33% in the last month) is the Digital Photography School. This really shows the power of guest posting. Beyond that it’s a great variety, with StumbleUpon coming in second, direct referrals third and Google fourth. I like to keep my traffic sources diverse! :)
According to my Analytics:
10.40% Direct Traffic
84.51% Referring Sites
5.09% Search Engines
Digging deeper, it looks like other photography blogs & SU send a lot of visitors my way.
As the blog I run is fairly new, the majority of our hits have come from amazingly timed and super useful comments on some very popular blogs. These, coupled with a few topics we have ranked well on for some search terms in Google, have helped our blog grow significantly in the 2 months we have been published.
Unfortunately, Google. I say that because those people don’t tend to stay too long. They come to my site, stay on that page for a few minutes (indicating that they’re just here to find a fix for their system) and then go. I get around two page views per visitor from Google, and they don’t usually come back.
That being said, I do get around 200 visitors a month from Google, which is around 70% of my visitors, so I guess they help. (260 uniques a month may be tiny for most of you guys, but it’s a lot for me. xP)
I suppose what I really need to do is find a way to make those visitors stick… Though, I’m not sure how. They obviously find my site helpful, otherwise they’d bounce out after a few seconds rather than minutes like they do…
My website is around 6 months old. I would love to have repeat visitors, and people subscribing to RSS, as that would mean people like my content and want to come back for more.
But a large portion of my current traffic is from Google. Maybe that’s coz mine is a niche site (personal finance), or maybe its coz the site is fairly new…
In a way, this is good as it means newer people are getting exposure to my website, but again, I am always wondering if they would come back….
Google.
Most of my visitors come to my static-page website (of which my blog is a part) from one of the more than 2000 other websites which link to various static pages on mine. Once on my website, some stay around long enough to find the blog.
Besides Google, the second biggest traffic source is forums. I post a decent amount on forums and people either click on links in my posts or forum signature. My site is fairly new (6 months or so) but RSS subscribers have seen a decent increase in the last month or so.
Google, hands down!
I’m new to the blog world. For now I would say free ad sites like craigslist. Doesn’t hurt to try!
“snake on a pole”
Who would have guessed?
Most of my ongoing trickle comes from Google organic, especially image search.
Most of my spikes come from the new Ycombinator news site, though one came from a high profile Tumblogger.
I did an in depth post about my traffic analysis comparing Feedburner, GA, and WordPress analytics that you can see if you click my name.
It seems strange to me that a “Planet” syndication is not listed as an option. My three biggest groups of readers are from three Planets that syndicate my blog.
Initially the most traffic comes from my newsletter sign-ups. But after that, Twitterin’ seems to do the trick.
Pete.
Google, Stumbleupon and Dzone ;)