If you own a website, you have one thing in common with every other website owner. You need traffic. Driving visitors to your site is considered the one thing that can make or break your business by many internet pundits. Without people visiting your site (that’s what internet traffic is) your website will fail.
Okay, so everyone knows they need traffic. What’s not as obvious is how to get it. Everyone seems to have different formulas for getting 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 suspicious. Others only produce traffic seasonally. But all traffic essentially comes down to this: free (natural) traffic, or paid traffic.
There are internet experts who maintain that free traffic is a myth. They maintain that all internet 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 traffic. Organic traffic is any traffic you receive that you did not directly pay for. Organic traffic can come from lots of places. It can come from people finding you in the search engine results and clicking on the link to your site. Natural traffic can come from natural links on other sites. Organic traffic can come when someone puts your website address directly into their browser. Perhaps they heard about your website from a coworker, in a newspaper article or on a radio show. All of these forms of traffic are natural traffic. These forms of traffic are free in the sense that you don’t pay someone to get that traffic. Here is a page that offers more SEO help.
Paid traffic is exactly the opposite. It is incoming traffic your website gets because you paid for it. This can be on a per-click basis from pay-per-click programs like Microsoft Adcenter. Paid traffic can be from a banner shown on a different website. Paid traffic can be from from someone entering in your website url from a paid print ad in a newspaper. There are many other scenarios that you can pay to get traffic.
You may be wondering which way is better? Many would say that the “free traffic” was better. In many cases it is. But free(organic) traffic can take a long time to get. You see, after you first create a website, no one knows about it, so no one will link to your site. Major search engines don’t know your website exists either, so they don’t show your site in any of the search results. Even viral marketing (word of mouth) can take a while to gain momentum. With paid advertising, you can usually start getting visitors to your site instantly. If you do it right, you can usually pay a lot less than what you make. 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 new site, carefully construct a pay-per-click campaign to gain immediate traffic. Monitor this ppc traffic closely at first, and run some split tests to determine what works best. Especially test which keyphrases are leading to conversions and profits. Refine your campaign to include more profitable words and eliminate the duds. Then, tweak your site internally for the high value key phrases and seek out link partners using those profitable keywords and phrases as the link text to relevant pages on your site. Within a few months, you will be getting lots of traffic from both the paid and natural traffic sources.
