In the latest indication of the power of Internet search, NBC said about one-third of traffic to its Web site comes from search.

“It’s one of the biggest sources for traffic,” said Marc Esper, VP of search for NBC Universal, during a session at an iHollywood conference in Los Angeles today. “Search is such an integrated behavior that it really is the starting point for the consumption for so much media.”

The remainder of NBC.com’s traffic comes from affiliate distribution, direct traffic and blog references.

Blog outreach is particularly important because blog references help a Web site boost its natural rankings, which is the order in which results are returned when Internet users search for a term.

“The stuff you do on your site is like 40 percent of what goes into the overall [search] ranking. The other 60 percent comes from outside your site. When we launch a new site, we do a lot of blog outreach,” Mr. Esper said.

(Editor: Horowitz)