Traffic Source Distribution on my blog

Recently I was just checking the Quality of social networking site traffic. I had a few of my pages in this blog submitted to StumbleUpon and got some traffic from it. I was just going through the Google Analytics report and found something interesting that I thought of sharing with you

I use Google Adwords for this blog and get a lot of clicks from the campaigns. Please note that I do not spend more than US$ 10 for the Ads on Adwords, and I feel its worth. I get most of my traffic from Adwords as this blog is new and there is no pagerank right now. I need to wait until I get good search engine ranking for this blog and it takes time. I am not worried about that, all I need is to have good quality content. I am not buying any links or I am not planning to for the sake of increasing link popularity of to increase the number of backlinks

My second traffic source is direct traffic, which are from visitors, who type in the URL of this blog and come to my blog. So its a good sign. This traffic source of high value and its a good sign

The third one is from StumbleUpon, but I am not happy with the quality of this traffic.

Reasons - The Bounce rate is the highest of all 92.73%, the time spend on this site is an average of just 1.08 minutes which is again the lowest. Time spent by a visitor who came from Google Adwords is 02.24 minutes, bounce rate is 63.28%, time spent by a visitor who came directly to my is 4.54 minutes and the bounce rate is less than 50%.

I feel the best traffic is the traffic which come directly and in my case, the best are from my feed subscribers which has a bounce rate of just 35% and the average time spent is about 19.16 minutes which is very good.

To conclude I would like to say is don’t worry much about the traffic, just concentrate on writing good content, respond to the comments, and provide the best and latest information to your readers. Don’t just rely of traffic from social networking sites. I see many bloggers depending on these traffic. You can use the stats for getting good advertisers for your blog, that is something which is useful from these kind of traffic.

Studying your traffic source

Its very important to keep track of your blogs statistics, traffic source , analyse your blog growth and for this I would suggest your use Google Analytics, which is the best and free system available. I use this for all my websites and get all the information that I need to know and this helps me in improving my blog traffic. With Google analytics your can find the traffic source, like if its from a particular site or search engines or from your Google adwords campaign or any other sources. If its search engine, you can find the keywords that your page ranked for and the number of visits or pageviews that you got from that particular keyword. You can even find information like the Location of the visitor, bounce rate, the time that the visitor spent on your website, the pages that the visitor visited during that visit, the location of the visitor, returning visitor, loyalty of the visitor, operating system that the visitor is using, the browser used by the visitor and tons of other information. These things are very important information that you need to have about your blog so that you can tune your blog for improving your traffic.

I was just going through the reports at Google Analytics and wondering about my blog traffic at this blog and found that 79% of my visitors are from referring sites. Which means that some site has my links posted and the visitor has clicked that like and came to this blog. I have very less visitors from search engines, reason is that this is a new blog and to get listed in search engine and getting top ranking for popular keywords will take some time. This blog does not have a Pagerank yet as its just started last month. I am not worried about search engine traffic as I am well aware how much time it takes to get ranked in search engine, but I still get traffic from search engines which is really a good sign for me.

Now I would just like to compare the traffic information of one of my other blog which has about 51% of the traffic from search engines. This blog is a bit old blog as well and has a fairly good pagerank. 41% of the traffic is from referring site. In fact the statistics of this blog was very different 1 month back. I never used social networking sites like stumbleupon or digg, but some visitor did submit some of my pages to these social networking sites and the statistics of my blog started changing. Earlier 85% of my traffic was from search engines and the remaining from other sources. This shows that Social Networking sites can really change the statistics of your blog. But there are some issues using social networking sites for traffic and many experts say that Social networking traffic and just waste of bandwidth. The conversion rate from these sites are very low. I will come up with a post after a detailed study on this topic

How important is pagerank for top bloggers

Pagerank is a ranking given by Google Search Engine for every page that is indexed by Google. Pagerank has importance for getting a good position on the Google SERPs. There are many factors which decide the SERPs, but I am not going to discuss those things as its out of scope for this post.

Last two pagerank updates have really slapped many bloggers with high pagerank. Google is against Paid Links and Paid Reviews. According to Google, web pages with high pagerank posting paid links which are not relevant to the content or website will effect the quality of the search results of their search engine. To discourage this, Google is penalizing such websites by reducing the pagerank of such websites. Johnchow was penalized for paid links and paid reviews. Same happened to many bloggers. Paid Links and Paid reviews are the best review generators for bloggers, but they get penalized if they are selling links. The only option to do post paid reviews and paid links is to use the rel=nofollow tag.

I was just doing some analysis of bloggers who were effected by the pagerank penality,  for example, Johnchow who is earning around US$30,000/- a month is still earning the same even though his pagerank is on 3 now which was 6 earlier.

How do combat pagerank penalty?

Once you are penalized by Google, then getting traffic from Google is something very rare. I am sure that the traffic share from Google must have reduced tremendously. But I see lots of Adwords campaign going on for his blog. He spends around US$ 400 every month on this and should be getting good traffic from that. He already has 25,000 subscribers and he has news letters which again keeps his traffic going.

Other option to carry on with paid links and paid reviews is to use the rel=nofollow tag, but the rates will not be same when you provide a link which can enhance the search engine ranking.

My advice to bloggers is not to go against the Terms of Google as Google is the best and free traffic provider. There is no alternative yet for Google. You can monetize your blog by other means like Google adsense or sell private ads with the rel=nofollow tag.