There are two main types of traffic that you can get to your site.

The first is search engine traffic. This is where your site has come up in the search engine listings for a particular keyword, and someone has clicked on the result, hoping that the page is going to be of use to them.

The second is where you have a link on another site, that may not be under your control. These are usually referred to as referral links.

I’ve noticed that the referral links tend to provide more value in terms of more pages visited on my site. The Google listing provide more traffic, but of slightly less quality.

Note that I’m measuring quality by the number of pages per visit, which is mainly due to the fact that my main goal is not to get money off people, but simply to put this stuff out there and see what happens. Interestingly enough, the BBC site, although providing fewer “hits” than most other sites, also provides more pages viewed per visit than either Google, Bing, Yahoo or other referrals. I’m guessing that this is due to the BBC attempting to provide high quality links, and hence the trust factor on BBC links is much higher than for other sites.

The biggest spike in BBC traffics came around August last year (2011), but doesn’t seem to correspond to any post or activity on my part, so I’m still not really clear as to what happened there. It also seems to have died off, so I’m presuming that it was time dependent.

Google traffic has steadily increased on the site over the last 12 months, while a minuscule part of the traffic comes from Bing, Yahoo! and Ask. The biggest referrer by far is artofmanliness.com, which accounts for almost as much traffic as Google, but results show that people don’t spend any more time, or visit any more pages than they do when coming from Google. The biggest page by number of hits is my Best Man’s Speech, written for Richard‘s wedding, and has consistently been high since it was put up there. It accounts for the majority of my traffic.

All in all, as visitors are still coming here, and in increasing numbers, despite the low level of posts, I think we are doing OK.