Who visits your website?

There are two types of people who visit your website

• Either they are your friends and relatives who are just keeping you motivated and visiting your website 
• or they are unknown people who don’t know you, but landed on your website in search of content you have posted on the website

Internet being so vast with ~2.3billion users around the world there are multiple channels through which the number of visitors to your website can increase. Let’s start listing the channel’s and see what you can do to promote your website later in detail

Following are the main traffic sources to any website.

• Direct 

• Typed: Visitors who directly come to the website by typing URL into the browser. Most of these people are your loyal customers who know you well and believe in you

• Bookmarked: Visitors who have bookmarked the website and use the bookmark to visit the website every time, again a very loyal set of customers

•  Referrers 

•  Internal Affiliate: Visitors who come to your website through an Independent web page created by you, but which is not a part of your website. These are also called as microsites

•  External Affiliates: Visitors who come to your website from an external website which is being hosted by an external partner to promote your website contents. These external partners are not doing social service, they have to be paid. 

• Aggregators: Visitors who land on your website through an external website which would be hosted by some external company. These companies’ aggregate similar products from various companies and host it on their website. They would provide extra functionality to visitors like comparison between similar products from two different vendors.  Simple example – creditcards.com

• Search Engines  

• Organic search: Organic traffic are the visitors who search for a product or content on the search engines (google, bing, yahoo etc) and click one of the innumerable results. 

•  Inorganic or Paid Search: Inorganic or paid traffic are the visitors who search for a product or content on search engines (google, bing, yahoo etc) and click on paid search results. The paid search results are the ones that get listed on top of the search results and are listed in a color background.  

• Others 

 

•  Display: These are the visitors who land on your website from your paid ad campaigns. On this page of india-forums.com you can see two paid ads one by facebook and the second one by somany on the right side of the page.

 

•  Social Media: Visitors, who come to your website from your social media publicity i.e. facebook pages, twitter tweets etc.

These are the top traffic sources for any website. Each of this is a profession in itself. People who would have expertise in all these channels are probably very few in this whole world.