I would like to know how it is possible for a site of mine -- which get's about 300 visitors daily -- to receive most of the traffic from direct traffic (according to analytics) yet have most of the visitors be new visitors (not returning). I thought that direct traffic would mostly be returning visitors since they are not being referred to my site by another site. They must be typing my site into the address bar, correct? If that is so then why are they not returning visitors? There is no way they could have heard of my site by word of mouth.
That is really confusing. I'm interested to see what others say here as well. My best guess would be they're coming in from somewhere like Digg, which uses a frame, and breaking the frame, which lands them "directly" on your blog. Digg, Ow.ly, and several other sites have taken up framing like this which lets them keep the traffic themselves as long as the bar isnt broke/closed.
It's likely coming from a website which doesn't set a referrer link, it may link using javascript or send traffic to your site via a third party that then redirects to your site. I found the same thing with my feed, analytics will count clicks from your feedburner feed as "direct traffic", but it does set utm tags