As a website owner, you have a shared need with every other website owner. Your website needs traffic. Website traffic is considered the holy grail by many industry pundits. Without people visiting your site (that’s what internet traffic is) 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 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 techniques are trendy. Some are shady. Others only work for certain industries. But in the end, most traffic to your site really comes down to two types: free (organic) traffic, or traffic you buy.
Certain SEO gurus say that free website traffic doesn’t exist. They maintain that all website traffic costs you something - either money, time or work. While that is true, we will still use the term “free traffic” in the same way most people use the term search engine traffic. Organic traffic is website traffic 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. It can come from people typing your website address directly into their browser. They may do this if they hear 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 someone directly to get that traffic. Here is a page that offers more SEO help.
Paid traffic works differently. It is any traffic your website gets because you paid for it. This can be on a per-click basis from pay-per-click programs like 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 newspaper. There are many other scenarios that you can pay for website traffic.
Which method is better? Many would say 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 link to your site. The search engines don’t know about your site either, so your site will never show up in the search results. Even viral marketing (word of mouth) can take a while to spread. When you buy an ad, you can usually start getting traffic right away. If you do it right, you can usually pay a lot less than what you make. In that case, buying traffic 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 non-optimized site, carefully create a pay-per-click campaign to get instant traffic. Gauge this ppc traffic closely at first, and run some split tests to determine what works best. Especially test which keyphrases are most profitable. Refine your ad campaign to include more profitable words and trim unprofitable keywords. Then, start optimizing your landing pages for the money key phrases and get some incoming links using those profitable keywords and phrases as the hyperlink to relevant pages on your site. Within 3 months to a year, you will be well-positioned in both the paid and free traffic sources.
