In my “Where Do I Stand?” post, K @ Studio Rockstar asked “I’m curious — what’s the split of your traffic like in terms of referrals/search/direct?” That’s a good question, and wanted to take a minute to examine on a deeper level where my traffic is coming from. By understanding where your traffic is coming from, a blogger will know where to make improvements. Do I need more search engine traffic? Do I need more referrals? Let’s take a look.

Below is a screenshot of the breakdown for August’s Awstats.

As you can see, 79% of my traffic comes from direct type-ins. Initially I thought that number was a little high considering Statcounter only shows about 40 returning uniques/day. This just means a lot of people know my blog exists, they just don’t visit it everyday. Maybe they come every other day. I’m also interested to know the percent of type in traffic on my some of my friends blogs. So feel free to leave me a comment so I know if my number is higher or lower than normal.

Search Engine traffic accounts for only about 12% of my total traffic. This number I though was too low. Without looking, I would have guessed around 30% based on the number of whacky searches I get. No surprise here that Google is the number 1 search engine referral, followed by Stumbleupon and Yahoo.

The Stumbleupon traffic is interesting because I just recently (as in a week or two ago) started submitting all my posts to Stumbleupon. I’ve tried to get into a habit of just automatically submitting my article right after I post it. So far, it seems to be working.

Finally we have external links, which accounts for 8.4% of my traffic. This is a number I’d really like to improve on. I’d like to see it around 15-20%. Once again, I’m not surprised to see John Chow as my top referrer. Now that he has a new design with the blogroll in the footer, it will be interesting to see if the number of uniques from his site to mine increases or decreases.

Long time blog roll friend Jon Waraas is next, followed by new comer Derek Beau. Derek and I just exchanged links recently. Probably not even a month ago and he is already working his way up the list. Other external links include Digitalpoint and MyBlogLog… so if you remove them, then external links probably accounts for only 7%.

Overall, I’d like to see my search engine percent increase some, but not too much. I guess it’s a good thing I don’t rely heavily on search engine traffic (just in case I got thrown into the Google sandbox). I’d also like to increase the percent of traffic coming from links. I need more backlinks folks! Feel free to give me some love in your next post.

I will try to utilize and compare these stats over the next month so I can better understand how where and how to increase my blog’s traffic.