As a website owner, 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 industry experts. Without visitors to your site (i.e. web traffic) your website is just a vacant piece of property on the internet landscape.
The need for website traffic is obvious. What’s not as obvious is how to get it. Everyone seems to have different 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 black-hat. Others only work seasonally. But all traffic essentially comes down to two types: free (organic) traffic, or traffic you buy.
Certain SEO gurus say that there is really no such thing as free traffic. They say that all website 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 search engine traffic. Natural traffic is website traffic that you did not buy outright. Natural traffic can have many different sources. It can come from the search engines. It can come from someone clicking on a link found in a different website. Natural traffic can come from people typing your website address directly into their browser. Perhaps they heard about your website from a friend, in a newspaper article or on a radio ad. All of these forms of traffic are natural traffic. These forms of traffic are free in the sense that you don’t pay a fee to get that traffic. Here is a page that offers more SEO help.
Paid traffic is just what its name says. It is incoming traffic you receive because you paid for it. This can be priced by the click from pay-per-click programs like Microsoft Adcenter. It can be a click from a banner that you paid to have displayed on a different website. It can be from when someone types in your website url from a paid print ad in a magazine or newsletter. There are many other scenarios that you can pay for website traffic.
So the question is, which is better? At first glance it may seem that the “free traffic” was better. In many cases it is. But free(organic) traffic can take a long time to get. When you first create a website, how many people know about it?. So initially, no one will link to your site. The search engines don’t know your website exists either, so they don’t show your site in any of the search results. Even word of mouth (often called viral marketing) can take a while to gain momentum. When you pay for your visitors, you can usually start getting website traffic immediately. Even though paid traffic costs money, you can usually make a lot more money than you pay for ads. In that case, paid traffic is a lot better than waiting years for your site to become profitable.
The best strategy, however, 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 construct a pay-per-click campaign to acquire immediate traffic. Gauge that 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 landing pages for the high value key phrases and start a linking campaign using those profitable keywords and phrases as the link text to relevant pages on your site. Within 3 months to a year, you will be getting lots of traffic from both the paid and natural traffic sources.