Did a quick analysis on all the referers to my web site. Referers being when web users click a link to my site from another site instead of manually typing in the URL. The result is not surprising but quite sad. About 5% of all referer visits to my web site is from other normal web pages. All the remaining is from search engine results such as Yahoo, Google etc or other obscure web services.
The sad truth is that very few people make a link to my site :(
The good thing is that my site must be very findable.
The most important conclusion is probably that people don't surf the web anymore. Instead they search it. I for one trust Google so much that I sometimes search instead of digging up the URL written down somewhere. This proves the importance of being findable on the web. You have to make your pages findable otherwise you don't get any hits. So, redesign your sites so that Google can index them accurately and avoid silly things like frames or images with text in them.
Comments
My site gets about 80% of all referals from Google. But I would not underestimate linky-love. Harder work though.
Take a closer look and you'll find that most of the remaining 20% is Yahoo, Looksmart, MSN, etc. etc. The question is: is that a good or a bad thing?
Most referrers come from the top two pages. Here's some data from my site mapping google search result page to number of clickthroughs.
It follows a power law function.
http://surfmind.com/musings/gems/google_clickthrough.gif