Everyone knows that search engines aren’t the only place to drive good targeted traffic to a Web site, but with all the other choices including various social bookmarking sites, article marketing, press releases, etc. and with limited time, where should you be spending your efforts?

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If it isn’t already apparent, it should be: Not all traffic is created equally. Here I won’t be dealing with the search engines though the quality among the big three does vary and a bit and that may be quite meaningful, but I want to focus on other traffic sources.

First off you should be able to see that emailcashpro.com is garbage traffic. I cannot begin to tell you the number of clients who have happily told me how they used a service like this or traffic exchanges while pointing to the numbers of visitors they received from these. Unfortunately when I walk them through the numbers and show that like in this case they had a high bounce rate, low time on the site and low page visits their mood changes.

How much traffic you get is meaningless unless it’s good Web site traffic.

Traffic that is good shares a number of qualities, high time on site, low bounce rates, and multiple page visits. There are a few sites and types of site that are exceptions but in most all cases this is true.

Looking at the remainder of the traffic above and judging it on those factors you can help but note that Squidoo.com is a solid source for traffic, PRweb.com comes in second with Stumbleupon coming in third place.

Admittedly these are only three sources, but you can learn a lot based on the types of sites they are. Visitors who take the time to read through a squidoo lens, or press release and then click through to your site are prequalified. They’ve already spent some time with your subject matter. Similar sites where visitor pre-qualify themselves as interested in your content should do just as well.

Sumbleupon.com actually has some of the attributes of traffic exchanges, but when you look at the above numbers one thing stands out, the bounce rate is quite low. Why? Because unlike traffic exchanges, visitors from Stumbleupon.com choose their areas of interest and only get shown sites based on this. So where emailcashpro.com (which is not traffic exchange but “pays” people to read email as do traffic exchanges) delivers uninterested and unqualified visitors, Stumbleupon delivers interested pre-qualified visitors. It’s also free and it has the highest percentage of new visitors which is worth something in terms of exposure since they at least stay long enough to remember your site exists.

Identifying quality Web site traffic sources realy comes down to one thing, visitors coming through the primary source have already shown interest in your subject matter. All other sources are junk traffic.

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