Organic Website Traffic Versus Paid Traffic
As a website owner, you have a shared need with every other website owner. You need traffic. Getting traffic to your website is considered the one thing that can make or break your business by many marketing pundits. Without people visiting your site (i.e. web traffic) your website will fail.
The need for website traffic is obvious. 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 ideas are trendy. Some are suspicious. Others only work in certain niches. But the majority of website traffic really comes down to two types: free (natural) traffic, or website traffic you pay for.
Certain SEO gurus say that there is really no such thing as free traffic. They maintain that all internet traffic costs you something – either money, time or work. While that is true, we will still use the term “free traffic” to describe the term search engine 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 people finding you in the search engine results and clicking on the link to your site. It can come from natural links on other sites. It can come from someone entering your website address directly into their browser. Maybe they heard about your website from a coworker, in a magazine article or on a radio ad. All of these forms of traffic are organic traffic. Such traffic is 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 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 Yahoo Search Marketing. Paid traffic can be a click from a banner that you paid to have displayed on someone else’s website. Paid traffic can be from when someone types in your website url from an ad you bought in a magazine. There are many other scenarios that you can pay for website traffic.
Which method is better? At first glance it may seem that the “free traffic” was better. In many cases it is. But free(organic) traffic also can take some time to get. For example, when 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 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. When you pay for your visitors, you can usually start getting website traffic right away. Even though paid traffic costs money, you can usually pay a lot less than what you make. In that scenario, paid traffic is a lot better than waiting months 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 non-optimized site, the first step is to craft a pay-per-click ad campaign to get instant traffic. Monitor your paid traffic closely at first. You may also want to test many different ad variations. Especially test which keywords and keyphrases are getting results. Refine your campaign to include more profitable words and delete any keywords that aren’t priducing results. Then, optimize your landing pages for the high value keywords and get some incoming links using those profitable keywords and phrases as the hyperlink to landing pages on your site. Within several months, you will be well-positioned in both the paid and organic traffic sources.
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