few weeks ago I saw in my stats (not this site stats, this is too new) a detail that made me think if there were kinds of traffic and if so which ones were better than others. As I said just a second all of this comes from the numbers and the stats. My search engine traffic has grown month by month since I started blogging three months ago and I did nothing special to achieve it, only some SEO advices and writing content. However my social traffic took me much more effort to build and it doesn’t grow as fast as my search engine traffic. So I started thinking of different kinds of traffic. I’m going to deal with two of them, I think the most relevant for blogging. These two kinds of traffic comes from two different strategies:

• Directly promoted methods: these are the ways the webmaster works directly, like link baiting, social networks, taking part in other blogs by comments, collaborations. This is  an active way to get yourself known, a set of social techniques. And the traffic derived from these techniques is the one we can call social traffic.
• Non directly promoted methods: here I basically include search engines. It is true that good or bad results at this level are directly related with the skills of the webmaster on SEO techniques , but a really good SEO work doesn’t mean you have to index manually every page you create, this is the job of the searchbots or spiders, so this method is somehow passive when compared with the first method. Your traffic is the result of a search, is essentially functional traffic or search engine traffic.

There are lots of differences between these two kinds of traffic. When your traffic comes mostly from directly promoted methods you will note some a decrease in traffic graphics over the weekend because this traffic is mostly made up of social interconnections and most of the visitors are bloggers who enter in your blog to see what’s new today. But like you they also need the weekend to rest.

What about search engine traffic or functional traffic? This traffic is different. Those visitors come in your blog because you are the result of something specific they’re looking for. It is not part of a social circle that you’re creating. Somewhere in the world someone is looking for something about you could give some useful information, and it doesn’t matter who you are or how many social visitors you have. This is the reason why functional traffic keeps working day by day independently which day of the week is.

This is one of the most important keys of the success of a website, blog or Web service in general. Knowing how to promote your site to attract as much functional traffic as possible. You can have one hundred friends who come every day to your blog and you’ll have at least one hundred visits a day, but the real merit is to make a hundred, two hundred or a thousand strangers enter your blog instead of go in another of the thousands of blogs that can also give them the answer they are looking for.

Functional traffic, this is the one we want to get because it provides us with much more possibilities.

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