If you own a website, you have one thing in common with every other website owner. You need traffic. Website traffic is considered the one thing that can make or break your business by many business gurus. Without visitors to your site (i.e. web traffic) your website is just a vacant piece of property on the internet landscape.
Okay, so everyone knows they need traffic. The real question is how to get it. There are as many different ways to attract traffic to your site. 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 fads. Some are black-hat. Others only produce traffic in certain niches. But all website traffic really comes down to two types: free (organic) traffic, or paid traffic.
Certain SEO gurus say that there is really no such thing as free traffic. 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. Natural traffic is any traffic you receive that you did not buy outright. Natural traffic can have many different sources. It can come from search engine results like Google, Yahoo or Bing. Natural traffic can come from incoming links. Organic traffic can come when someone puts your website address directly into their browser. Perhaps they heard about your website from a friend, in a published article or on a radio computer talk show. All of these forms of traffic are natural traffic. These forms of traffic are 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 you receive because you paid for it. This can be on a per-click basis from pay-per-click programs like Google Adwords or Microsoft Adcenter. It can be a click from a banner that you paid to have displayed 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 numerous other ways you can pay for website traffic.
You may be wondering which way is better? Common sense would indicate that the “free traffic” was better. There is no doubt that free is usually good. But free (natura) traffic takes time to establish. You see, after 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 your site either, so you won’t be displayed very high in the search results. Even word of mouth (often called viral marketing) takes time to gain momentum. When you buy an ad, you can usually start getting visitors to your site immediately. Yes, you have to pay for it, but if done correctly, you can usually make a lot more money than you pay for ads. In that scenario, paying for your traffic is a lot better than waiting for your site to become profitable.
When it comes to a traffic strategy, the smart choice 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, the first step is to construct a pay-per-click ad campaign to gain initial traffic. Monitor your paid 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 trim unprofitable keywords. Then, optimize your site’s pages for the profitable key phrases and start a linking campaign using those profitable keywords and phrases as the anchor text to specific pages on your site. Within 3 months to a year, you will be well-positioned in both the paid and natural traffic sources.
