As a website owner, you have a shared need with every other website owner. You need traffic. Driving visitors to your site is considered the most important thing by many marketing experts. Without people visiting your site (i.e. web traffic) 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. The real question is how to get it. Experts each promote their own ways to attract 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 short-term. Some are shady. Others only are effective seasonally. But in the end, most traffic to your site eventually comes down to this: free (organic) traffic, or traffic you buy.
Certain SEO gurus say that all traffic costs something. They say that all website traffic costs you something – either money, time or work. While that is true, we will still use the term “free traffic” as a synonym with natural traffic. Natural traffic is website traffic that you did not buy outright. Natural traffic can come from lots of places. It can come from the search engines. It can come from incoming links. It can come from people typing your website address directly into their browser. Perhaps 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 directly to get that traffic. Here is a page that offers more SEO help.
Paid traffic is exactly the opposite. It is website traffic your site receives as a direct result of paying 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 a different website. It can be from from people typing in your website url from an ad you bought in a newsletter. There are many other scenarios that you can pay for traffic.
So the question is, which is better? Many would say that the “free traffic” was better. In many cases it is. But free(organic) traffic can take a long time to get. You see, after you first create a website, how many people know about it?. So initially, no one will link to your site. Major search engines don’t know your website exists either, so your site will never show up in 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 immediately. Yes, you have to pay for it, but if done correctly, you can usually pay a lot less than what you make. In that example, buying traffic is a lot better than waiting months or 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 unadvertised site, carefully create a pay-per-click ad campaign to get immediate traffic. Gauge this ppc traffic closely at first. You may also want to test many different ad variations. Especially test which words and phrases are most profitable. Refine your ad campaign to include more profitable words and trim unprofitable keywords. Then, optimize your site’s pages for the high value keywords and get some incoming links using those profitable keywords and phrases as the anchor text to specific pages on your site. Within a few months, you will be well-positioned in both the paid and natural traffic sources.