As we all know, traffic is the bloodline of our website. No matter what kind of site you may have out there, from internet marketing tips to foot care, without traffic, your site will be nothing more than some space somewhere on the world wide web.

This is NOT why you spent time and energy building a website, did you? I am sure that all you want at this point is traffic, but what traffic? Are there several types of traffic?

The term traffic is a wide term, and while some type of traffic is good there can be a type of traffic that is really useless. Your job is to lessen on the useless traffic while you improve on the good traffic.

So, let see how you can improve the good traffic while getting less of the useless one. Let’s analyze the three main types of traffic.

• Search engine traffic
• Referral traffic
• Direct traffic

Search engine traffic is easy enough to figure out, it’s the traffic that you get from people typing your keywords on the search engine and find your site that way. Search engine traffic is usually targeted traffic, unless you are using the wrong keywords for you niche.

If you did use the wrong keywords, you would be getting useless traffic, which means that people landing on your site would count as bounce traffic.

Basically, the amount of traffic that you will be getting from this source depends on how well you know how to optimize your site and how good you are at SEO. It can also depend on how much competition you have and how old is your site.

Referral traffic is the traffic that comes from “other sites” for example, if you have a link to your site on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Stubleupon, article directories, and so on. In such case, when people click on your site it’s called referral traffic.

Also, if you post a comment on a blog and people click on your link from that comment, such traffic will be referral traffic. If people find your site on RSS feed sites and land on your site from that source it will be called referral traffic as well.

These are just few examples; there are many different ways to get referral traffic. This type traffic may sometimes not be as targeted as search engine traffic, but again, if you anchor links to your site are the right kind of keywords it will improve your traffic and it should be a good targeted traffic in the end.

I left the best for last. Direct traffic is your best traffic, but it’s the kind of traffic that you will need to earn. Direct traffic comes from people who have got to your site (in the past) by either search engine or referral and liked what they found.

Such visitors become direct visitors (traffic) when they also put your URL directly on the browser or click on your links through your emails PDF eBooks, etc…

This is when you will fully understand the value of having a valuable site using valuable content, because direct traffic will be your long term traffic and the best customer pool you will ever have. It’s also a great way to build natural back links to your site every time a comment is left.

The smartest and most logical ways you go about attracting traffic to your site, the more valuable your traffic will be. On the other hand, if you are not following those simple logic rules to attract targeted traffic is will be useless traffic which will be of no benefits at all to you and your online business.