If you own a website, you have one thing in common with every other website owner. Your website needs traffic. Driving visitors to your site is considered the most important thing by many industry experts. Without visitors to your site (that’s what internet traffic is) you will never get them to buy your product, or click your link, or sign up for your newsletter.
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 techniques are trendy. Some are black-hat. Others only are effective in certain countries. But all website traffic essentially comes down to this: free (natural) traffic, or traffic you buy.
Certain SEO gurus say that all traffic costs something. They say that all web 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 natural or organic traffic. Natural traffic is any traffic you receive that you did not directly pay for. Natural traffic can have many different sources. It can come from people finding you in the search engine results and clicking on the link to your site. Organic traffic can come from someone clicking on a link found in a different website. It can come from people typing your website address directly into their browser. Maybe they heard about your website from a friend, in a newspaper article or on a radio show. All of these forms of traffic are organic 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 is exactly the opposite. It is incoming traffic your site receives as a direct result of paying for it. This can be priced by the click from pay-per-click programs like Google Adwords. Paid traffic can be from a banner shown on someone else’s website. It can be from when someone types in your website url from a paid print ad in a magazine. There are several other ways you can pay for traffic.
Which method is better? Common sense would indicate that the “free traffic” was better. In many cases it is. But free, or natural traffic can take a long 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 you won’t be displayed very high in the search results. Even viral marketing (word of mouth) takes time to gain momentum. With paid advertising, you can usually start getting visitors to your site right away. If you do it right, you can usually make a lot more money than you pay for ads. In that case, purchasing an ad is a lot better than waiting months or 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, the first step is to create 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, start optimizing your site internally for the high value key phrases and seek out link partners using those profitable keywords and phrases as the hyperlink to internal pages on your site. Within a few months, you will be dominating both the paid and natural traffic sources.
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