Getting Website Traffic

Your website is of little use unless it gets traffic i.e. visitors.  For most website the main traffic source are the search engines.

What most new site owners don’t always understand is that search engines can provide you with two traffic sources.

These are known as organic or free and paid traffic

If you go to any of the major search engines (Google,Yahoo,Bing) and conduct a search the search engine will present the results of the search on a page commonly known  as  SERPS (search engine results page).

How the listings are formatted vary slightly from search engine to search engine but you usually find the divided as shown below:

And here is how it appears on Google:

As You can see the page is divided into two main areas known as paid  and organic.

Websites appear in the organic listings based on merit i.e. there is no payment involved and they appear in the paid listings only if they have paid to advertise on that search engine.

Organic Traffic Pros and Cons

Generally speaking to get organic traffic from any of the search engines you need to be on the first page of the search results for whatever search terms the searcher used. In order for this to happen the search engine has to think that your site/page is more relevant to the searcher than any of the others that also satisfy that search query.

So if the searcher types in blue metal widgets then the search engine will rank all of the pages in its index that contain information about blue metal widgets in order of relevance.

To get yours in the first 10 then it needs to be ( in the opinion) of the search engine more relevant that the other pages that get ranked below it.

Getting your pages ranked in the search engines can be a time consuming process requiring either the services of a search engine specialist or knowledge of SEO (search engine Optimization).

Organic traffic has some very important benefits:

• Free
• Trusted be searcher
• Results in traffic from all three engines.
• Once you are ranked well it can bring you traffic for many years without any real effort on your part.

It Also has some problems:

• Can be difficult to get
• SEO consultants are expensive so the initial cost can be high if you need to use one.
• Can be difficult to do yourself without proper training
• Takes time to get for new sites (many months and maybe years)

Paid Traffic Pros and Cons

There are two main providers of paid advertising services-PPC (pay per click) . They are:

• Google Adwords
• Microsoft Adcenter

Paid advertising is also commonly known as paid search involves you bidding for a space on the Search results Page (SERP) of the search engines.

In general the more money you are willing to pay the higher up the page you appear.

Paid traffic has some very important benefits:

• Very Quick to get – in 15 minutes of opening an account.
• Very Targeted.

It Also has some problems:

• Can be very expensive
• Once you stop advertising your traffic stops.
• Can be difficult to do yourself without proper training
• You have to advertise on all three of the major engines if you want traffic from all three.

For most sites search engines are the main traffic source, however it is important to realise that search engines aren’t the only possible source of traffic.

Here is a quick guide to the online Website promotion options that you can use to get more traffic:

• Search Engines
• PPC (Pay Per Click)
• Article Promotion
• Feeder Sites
• Blogging
• RSS feeds
• Email Marketing -Newsletters and Newsletter/Ezine advertising
• Link Exchange
• Banner advertising

It is also important to remember that you can market/promote your website offline as well as online using Newspaper/magazine adverts,direct mail, yellow pages etc.

Resources:

• Free Basic SEO course at my other site-Should be all you need