Search engine traffic versus link traffic.

[newsguy]

I've always read (and it makes sense to believe) that search engine traffic is the best kind of traffic because it's very targetted--people are actively looking for what your site contains (usually).

But one of my sites in particular gets a lot of traffic from a link that's on another site with a similar theme. Would that traffic be just as good as the search engine traffic? What do you think?

[jrdorkin]

I argue that any traffic is good traffic if those visiting your site want to be there. If you are providing the content they want, then that's all you can ask for. What I do is look to see how much time is spent and how many pages our visitors view on my site to get an idea if the visitor is there by accident or if they want to be there.

Enjoy all your traffic!

[stephenmunday]

I think you are the best judge of the quality of traffic that comes from different sources. If you are looking at your log stats, and especially if you are using a service that allows you to track visitors through to a desired action, you will be able to see the difference in these two sources.

If one source produces a lot of visitors but results in few / no desired actions (purchases / sign-ups etc.) occuring then you can say that this source produces low-quality traffic. It may be that this kind of traffic is actually a curse, as it eats up your bandwidth without producing any beneficial result.

If through your analysis you discover that links produce good quality converting traffic, you may want to think about how you can capitalize on this by setting up an affiliate program to encourage webmasters on related sites to channel visitors through to you.

If you find out that the search engine traffic is better quality, then you want to keep on getting links so as to ensure high placements in the SERPs, but you also want to look at the cost of these links as well. For example, if a webmaster puts up a link that drives a lot of visitors who never buy to your site, you may want to consider whether the cost is worthwhile (say in higher PR) or not. Although it is usually true to say that a site that has a lot of vistors also has a decent PR, as they must be getting their visitors from somewhere.