If you own a website, you have one thing in common with every other website owner. You need traffic. Getting traffic to your website is considered the most important thing by many marketing pundits. Without people visiting your site (i.e. web traffic) your website will fail.
Okay, so everyone knows they need traffic. The real question is how to get it. Experts each promote their own techniques and philosophies on how to get traffic to your website. Some people feel that search engine traffic is best. They use special programs like SEO elite to optimize their site (look here for a full SEO Elite Review). Others feel that paid traffic is the best, like pay-per-click traffic from Adwords. (If you go that route, be sure to read the Adwords Help page).
Many of the methods are short-term. Some are barely legal. Others only work for certain industries. But the majority of traffic really comes down to this: free (organic) traffic, or paid traffic.
Certain SEO gurus say that free website traffic doesn’t exist. They explain that all web traffic costs you something – whether time, effort or money. While that is true, we will still use the term “free traffic” to describe the term natural or organic traffic. Organic traffic is website traffic that you did not directly pay for. Natural traffic can have many different sources. It can come from the search engines. Natural traffic can come from incoming links. It can come from someone entering your website address directly into their browser. Maybe they heard about your website from a friend, in a newspaper article or on a radio computer talk show. All of these forms of traffic are organic traffic. Such traffic is free in the sense that you don’t pay directly to get that traffic. Here is a page that offers more SEO help.
Paid traffic is just what its name says. It is any traffic your website gets as a direct result of paying for it. This can be priced by the click from pay-per-click programs like Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing. Paid traffic can be a click from a banner that you paid to have displayed on a different website. It can be from from people typing in your website url from an advertisement in a magazine or newsletter. There are several other ways you can pay for traffic.
You may be wondering which way is better? At first glance it may seem that the “free traffic” was better. There is no doubt that free is usually good. But free(organic) traffic also can take some time to get. When you first create a website, no one knows about it, so no one will put links on their site to yours. The search engines don’t know about it either, so your site will never show up in the search results. Even word of mouth (often called viral marketing) can take a while to spread. When you pay for your visitors, you can usually start getting incoming traffic to your site instantly. Yes, you have to pay for it, but if done correctly, you can usually you can make more money than the traffic costs. In that example, purchasing an ad is a lot better than waiting years for your site to become profitable.
If you now think paid advertising is better – hold on. The wisest path is to use (both|both free and paid traffic techniques|paid and free traffic techniques|both natural and purchased traffic methods} in combination with each other. If you have a unadvertised site, carefully craft a pay-per-click ad campaign to get instant traffic. Monitor that traffic closely at first. Especially test which words and phrases are leading to conversions and profits. Refine your ad campaign to include more profitable words and delete any keywords that aren’t priducing results. Then, optimize your site internally for the high value keywords and seek out link partners using those profitable keywords and phrases as the hyperlink to landing pages on your site. Within a few months, you will be getting lots of traffic from both the paid and organic traffic sources.