How do surfers get to a web site?

Visitors to a web site get there from a variety of sources. On most of the web sites I manage this is the order of importance of source of visitors

• referral from another web site - normally it is one I control and can tailor make referrals
• via a search engine query
• via a bookmark - the person has found your site before, and bookmarked it for further reading
• via e-mail - the link was been added to an e-mail so that the recipient clicks directly on it
• via links from a news group - I have yet to find anyone with success at getting bookings from newsgroups postings

To all intents and purposes only the first two "web site referral" and "search engine listing" are of any volume importance.

And web site referrals will outnumber search engine referrals by 2 or 3 to every 1 from a search engine, depending on the site. The longer a site has been around, and the more work that has been done on it, the more web site referrals it gets

Search engine referrals and web site referrals are dealt with in more detail on these pages

Return to Web Site Facts & Figures web site facts and figures page