Looking back at a years worth of data for this blog, and comparing it to the previous, I wanted to know what types of marketing worked best. It seems that the best thing that I can do for this site is to simply keep posting new content.

Looking at the Stats

After looking at the stats I saw many sources come and go. A few marketing methods appeared to work, but not at a level I was hoping or expecting. I have three sources of traffic, direct, referring, and search. When looking at Google’s analytics to do the comparison, make sure you don’t just click on Traffic Sources. Click on Traffic Sources, and then click on each source for their stats; Direct, Referring, Search. This will show percentage of growth based for each source. If you were to just click Traffic Sources the percentages are comparisons to total traffic growth, and it may mislead you.

My Direct traffic had a nice 37% increase. My referral traffic went up by 18%, and my search traffic went up by a whopping 65%. What I do to improve my SEO. I added more content to my site.

Seeing direct traffic go up is a healthy indicator that people want to go to your website. They have used bookmarks, they typed in your url, or they simply came from some unknown source. I love unknown sources because it means your site is being marketed or shared in ways you are unaware of.

My referral traffic did go up, by only 18%, and I think this could be the wake up call not to just myself but many of you. How many of you have tried getting more traffic by posting comments on forums or blogs. Maybe you Twitter a lot. Whatever source you are digging into for referral traffic I would say don’t spend too much time doing it. To me, that is like trying to chop down a tree with a stick. If you bash the tree, say 33 million times, it might fall down. It may not as well. Referral traffic is important though, so don’t give up on it, for SEO reasons alone. On BWI it accounted for 30% of all my traffic. Last year it was even higher.

Search engine traffic is what this post is really about, and I could not complain for one moment how that is going. My traffic compared to last year has more than doubled, actually going up 65%. Google, Yahoo, and Bing all went up drastically. Did I do anything major to optimize my site? Nope, but if you compared the number of posts on this site I would bet it’s about 65% more than last year. Content is the draw, and search engine is the traffic provider.

What could be my best move to increase website traffic for this site? Write more posts! Direct traffic will follow, and if I have any smarts, I will still spend some time to try to get some referral traffic on the side.

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