Search engine traffic versus link traffic.

[newsguy]

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I've always read (and it makes sense to believe) that search engine traffic is the best kind of traffic because it's very targetted--people are actively looking for what your site contains (usually).

But one of my sites in particular gets a lot of traffic from a link that's on another site with a similar theme. Would that traffic be just as good as the search engine traffic? What do you think?

[sr1972]

It sure sounds like they would be comparable. Let's think about it, if someone performs a search for certain keywords and your site pops up, that's targeted traffic. If during that same search the user clicks on someone else's site, and then finds your link on that site, that would also be targeted traffic.

That would be an example of a targeted user regardless of the path they took to get to your site.

I would think that by clicking on your link, the user found your website title appealing to what they were looking for, hence targeted traffic.

[webvideo4u]

It depends on the site really.

For instance we're listed on a few sites about web conferencing so users are actively looking for web conferencing, hence the traffic is very targeted.

Other links can be somewhat less targeted but they've still taken the effort to click through to your site so they must be interested in what you have to offer.