One way to measure the success of a website is to know how much website traffic it receives. Traffic or visitors don't just flock to a website once it's launched out of nowhere, so some effort must be poured in to get the traffic you want.

Increasing website traffic requires quite a bit of hard work, and it is a continuous process. It might be slow at first, but once it reaches its tipping point, things will work automatically as the visitors voluntarily carry out the job. All you need to do at that time is to monitor and promote the process.

Entry points

There are many ways that a visitor would come to your website. Therefore, increasing visitors to your website would mean improving any if not all the entry points to your website. You can prioritize your strategy based on the importance of each type of website traffic.

Search engine

It is the type of traffic that finds its way to your website via search engines such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing, to name a few. It is the most common and valuable website traffic because the type of visitor coming to your site via search engine usually searches for certain information about a product. They are normally unique (non-repeat) visitors, don't stay long at your website, and they are the type that would convert most of your website is selling products or serving ads.

There are normally millions of search results for a particular keyword during a search via the search engine, and people normally click only on the first few results of the search engine results page (SERP). Therefore, your website needs to have a high search engine ranking and appear as the first few results on a search engine results page.

Referral

Referring traffic means traffic that originates from other websites. This type of traffic has a conversion rate similar to search engine traffic and is good for website monetization.

Referring traffic normally comes from forums, though it's also common in blog posts or blogroll links in blogs.

This type of website traffic is also mostly of unique visitors and generally generates more page views per visitor than search engine traffic. Visitors from referring traffic are also more likely to be a loyal subscribers to a website.

Direct

Direct traffic visitors come to your website directly, without being referred by other sites or from a search engine search. It is common for forums and blogs and doesn't monetize well. The visitors are familiar with the particular website and visit them regularly.

The direct traffic visitor generates the highest pageviews per visit compared to any other type of website traffic.

Social

Social traffics are traffics that originate from social bookmarking or social networking sites. It could get viral sometimes and produce high spikes in web traffic to your site. It's doesn't convert well if you're monetizing your site, but a small percentage of tens of thousands of visitors is still a good number.

Monitor and analyze

You'll never know for sure how much traffic your website gets unless you have a way actually to monitor every visitor to your website. Having a good insight into your website's visitors will help you plan your next step in your strategy to increase your website traffic.